LORDS AND LORDSHIP IN THE BRITISH ISLES ... - DropPDF1.droppdf.com/files/q3N8n/lords-and-lordship-in-the-british-isles-in-the-late-middle...Lords and lordship in the British Isles

LORDS AND LORDSHIP IN THE BRITISH ISLESIN THE LATE MIDDLE AGES

This page intentionally left blank

Lords and Lordship in theBritish Isles in the Late

Middle Ages

R. R. DAVIES

Edited by

BRENDAN SMITH

1

1Great 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 KarachiKuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi

New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto

With offices in

Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France GreeceGuatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal SingaporeSouth Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam

Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Pressin the UK and in certain other countries

Published in the United Statesby Oxford University Press Inc., New York

Lady Davies 2009

The moral rights of the author have been assertedDatabase 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 reproductionoutside 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 coverand 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 2009305.5’2209410902—dc22 2008055133

Typeset by Laserwords Private Limited, Chennai, IndiaPrinted and bound in the UK

on acid-free paper byMPG Biddles Ltd, King’s Lynn, Norfolk

ISBN 978–0–19–954291–8

1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

Contents

Abbreviations viiEditor’s Introduction xi

Apologia 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 219Additional Bibliography 233Index 241


Abbreviations

Adam Usk, Chronicle Adam Usk, Chronicle, 1377–1421, ed.C. Given-Wilson (Oxford, 1997)

Age of Chivalry Age of Chivalry: Art in Plantagenet England,1200–1400, ed. J. Alexander and P. Binski(London, 1987)

BIHR Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research

BL The British Library, London

Cal. Anc. Corr. Calendar of Ancient Correspondence ConcerningWales, ed. J. G. Edwards (Cardiff, 1935)

Cal. Anc. Pets. Calendar of Ancient Petitions Relating to Wales,ed. W. Rees (Cardiff, 1975)

CCR Calendar of Close Rolls (London, 1892–)

CIM Calendar of Inquisitions Miscellaneous, 1219–1485, 7 vols. (London and Woodbridge,1916–2003)

CIPM Calendar of Inquisitions Post Mortem, 23 vols.(London, 1904–2004)

CPR Calendar of Patent Rolls (London, 1891–)

Davies, Lordship and Society R. R. Davies, Lordship and Society in the Marchof Wales, 1282–1400 (Oxford, 1978)

DNB Dictionary of National Biography, 66 vols., ed.L. Stephens and S. Lee (London, 1885–1901;reprinted with corrections, 22 vols., London,1908–9)

Dugdale, Monasticon W. Dugdale, Monasticon Anglicanum: A His-tory of the Abbies and other Monasteries, Hos-pitals, Friaries, and Cathedral and CollegiateChurches, with their Dependencies, in England

viii Abbreviations

and Wales, 6 vols. in 8 (2nd edn., London,1817–30)

Duncan, Scotland A. A. M. Duncan, Scotland: The Making of theKingdom (Edinburgh, 1975)

Econ. HR Economic History Review

EHR English Historical Review

Frame, Ireland and Britain R. Frame, Ireland and Britain 1170–1450(London, 1998)

GEC The Complete Peerage of England, Scotland,Ireland, Great Britain and the United Kingdom,ed. G. E. Cockayne et al., 12 vols. in 13(London, 1910–59)

Holmes, Estates G. Holmes, The Estates of the Higher Nobilityin Fourteenth-Century England (Cambridge,1957)

Household Accounts Household Accounts from Medieval England, ed.C. M. Woolgar, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1993)

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

McFarlane, Nobility K. B. McFarlane, The Nobility of Later Medi-eval England: The Ford Lectures for 1953 andRelated Studies (Oxford, 1973)

Moray Reg. Registrum Episcopatus Moraviensis, ed. C. Innes(Bannatyne Club, Edinburgh, 1833)

Mort. Reg. Registrum Honoris de Morton, ed. T. Thomson,A. Macdonald and C. Innes, 2 vols. (Ban-natyne Club, Edinburgh, 1853)

Nichols, Wills A Collection of all the Wills, Now Known toBe Extant, of the Kings and Queens of Eng-land, Princes and Princesses of Wales, and everyBranch of the Blood Royal, from the Reign ofWilliam the Conqueror, to that of Henry theSeventh Exclusive: With Explanatory Notes anda Glossary, ed. J. Nichols (London, 1780)

Abbreviations ix

NLW National Library of Wales, Aberystwyth

ODNB Oxford Dictionary of National Biography: Fromthe 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 Peaceand War 1278–1476’, ed. M. Jones andS. Walker, Camden Miscellany, 32 (London,1994)

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

Reg. BP Register of Edward the Black Prince, 4 vols.(London,1930–3)

Reg. Chichele Register of Henry Chichele, Archbishop of Can-terbury 1414–43, ed. E. F. Jacob, 4 vols.(Oxford, 1938–47)

Reg. JG I John of Gaunt’s Register, 1372–76, ed.S. Armitage-Smith, 2 vols., Camden 3rd series,xx–xxi (London, 1911)

Reg. JG II John of Gaunt’s Register, 1379–83, ed. E. C.Lodge and R. Somerville, 2 vols., Camden 3rdseries, lvi–lvii (London, 1937)

Rot. Parl. Rotuli Parliamentorum, ed. J. Strachey et al.7 vols. (London, [1783], 1832)

SHR Scottish Historical Review

Smyth, Lives of the Berkeleys J. Smyth, The Berkeley Manuscripts: The Livesof the Berkeleys, Lords of the Honour, Castle andManor of Berkeley . . ., ed. J. MacLean, 3 vols.(Gloucester, 1883–5)

Test. Vet. Testamenta Vetusta: Being Illustrations fromWills, of Manners, Customs, &c. as Well asof the Descents and Possessions of many Distin-guished Families: From the Reign of Henry theSecond to the Accession of Queen Elizabeth, ed.N. H. Nicolas, 2 vols. (London, 1826)

x Abbreviations

TNA The National Archives: Public Record Office,London

TRHS Transactions of the Royal Historical Society

VCH H. A. Doubleday, W. Page, L. F. Salzmann,and R. B. Pugh (eds.), Victoria History of theCounties of England (1900–)

Editor’s Introduction

Professor Davies worked on Lords and Lordship in the British Isles in the LateMiddle Ages (henceforward Lords and Lordship) until shortly before his deathon 16 May 2005. His last intervention was to make handwritten additions toa typescript of the first several chapters, including the insertion of references towork published as recently as 2005, and to write another chapter which hadyet to be typed when he died. He had been compiling material for the projectthroughout the course of his career, but composition of Lords and Lordship seemsto have begun in or around the year 2000. It was planned as a book of twoparts, the first entitled ‘Lords’, the second ‘Lordship’. Work on the first part, atleast as a first draft, appears to have been at an advanced stage by May 2005,and much of the second part had also been written, though at least one morechapter was in genesis bearing the working title ‘The Context of AristocraticLordship’.

The editorial intervention required to make a substantial but unfinished pieceof work suitable for publication involved the abandonment of the two-partstructure on account of the brevity of the second part in comparison with thefirst. It is hoped, however, that the essence of the division envisaged by theauthor—that the book should move from what lordship was to what it did —isstill discernible. Both parts had introductory chapters, and these have beenamalgamated to form the ‘Apologia’—the title of the original introduction toPart 1. The chapter ‘The Higher Aristocracy: Identity and Memory’ now alsoembraces a short chapter called ‘The Individual Lord’, while the chapter ‘The Lordat Home’ now incorporates another short chapter entitled ‘Household, Supplies,and Credit’. Apart from the consolidation of material across different chapters,the removal of occasional repetition, and the standardization of footnotes, thetext is unaltered. Where new editions of works cited have appeared since ProfessorDavies ceased to write I have included them in the footnotes in closed bracketsafter the original citation: two examples are PROME and W. Childs’ edition ofthe Vita Edwardi Secundi. I have appended an ‘Additional Bibliography’ to eachchapter, and the works thus cited appear in consolidated form at the end of thevolume. With a handful of exceptions these additions date from 2000 and after,with the majority having been published within the last five years. The intentionhas not been to provide a complete bibliography on lordship in the late medievalBritish Isles, but rather to draw attention to some of the recent work from acrossthe region which relates to the theme of the book.

Inevitable tension exists between the decision to keep interference with theoriginal text to a minimum and the reasonable assumption that the author wouldhave altered at least some of what is now published had he lived. Such alterations

xii Editor’s Introduction

might have been particularly marked in final versions of the ‘Apologia’ and thechapter ‘Dependence, Service, and Reward’. Professor Davies’s argument in theformer that the concept of lordship has been neglected in the historiography oflate medieval England is difficult to reconcile with the quantity and quality ofwork published on the subject—much of which he cites in the course of thebook—especially for the fifteenth century. It can be noted that he uses the phrase‘late Middle Ages’ to signify the chosen period of his analysis (1272–1422), andthat the historiography of the reign of Henry VI, upon which he draws onlyoccasionally, is particularly sensitive to issues of lordship. It can also be offeredthat his book is about the British Isles, not England, and that for Scotlandand Ireland a ‘long fourteenth century’ as opposed to a ‘late Middle Ages’perspective is historiographically meaningless. It remains the case, however, thathistorians of late thirteenth- and fourteenth-century England will demur fromthe suggestion that they have paid insufficient attention to aristocratic lordshipin their analysis of English society and politics. Had Professor Davies decidedto leave the ‘Apologia’ substantially as it now stands—and he had re-read itwithout making alterations to the text shortly before his death—then one mustassume that he believed that something important remained to be said about thesubject; one may hazard a guess that this was that while lordship as an expressionof political power in particular circumstances had been thoroughly discussedsince McFarlane, analysis of the institution of lordship as a concept and in moregeneral practice lagged behind, not least because the failure to view it in a BritishIsles as opposed to an English setting had obscured and distorted its true essence.

The final chapter, ‘Dependence, Service, and Reward’, is problematic forsome of the same reasons. It had not been typed by May 2005, and althoughfully footnoted by Professor Davies, was obviously in a less finalized state thanthe rest of the material. Historians of fifteenth-century England in particularwill be puzzled at its suggestion that suspicion of ‘maintenance’ is misplaced,since they abandoned such suspicion long ago, while thanks in particular to thework of Christine Carpenter and Edward Powell, legal records have supplantedindentures as the preferred source for the study of aristocratic behaviour withinthe locality, across wider political society, and with the crown and its officers.The decision to include the chapter was made on the basis of what it containedand also because of the pointers it gave to what was still to come. While historiansof late medieval England will find little in it that is original, it breaks new groundby opening up the issues indicated by its title to embrace the British Isles in totoand thus is absolutely true to the aim of the project as a whole. It also containssome indications as to the themes to be addressed in the chapter or chaptersyet to be written: the role of aristocratic retainers in their own communities;the changing nature of lordship in a world in which it operated as only one ofmany bonds between superior and inferior; the demands placed upon lordshipby its requirement to be ‘good’—in short, the crucial issue of the limitations oflordship in the rapidly changing British Isles of the late Middle Ages. It seems

Editor’s Introduction xiii

highly likely that the proposed chapter ‘The Context of Aristocratic Lordship’would have had this issue at its heart.

A full account of Professor Davies’s career and an assessment of his importanceas a historian can be found in Professor Huw Pryce’s memoir ‘Robert ReesDavies 1938–2005’, to be published in a forthcoming volume of Proceedings ofthe British Academy. This is not the place to offer a critical assessment of Lords andLordship, but it seems appropriate to note some moments in the developmentof the ideas expounded therein. The interest in lordship in the fourteenth andfifteenth centuries, of course, stretches back to Professor Davies’s doctoral studiesunder the supervision of K. B. McFarlane, which commenced in 1959. (ProfessorDavies’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 thesisand identified some of the key themes which are revisited and expanded upon inthe present book. Professor Davies’s willingness to broaden the geographical areain which he examined the phenomenon of lordship beyond the Welsh Marchand England to include Ireland was first signalled in print in his essay ‘Lordshipor Colony?’, in The English in Medieval Ireland, ed. J. F. Lydon (Dublin,1984)—notably, the first work cited by Professor Davies in this book—andagain in ‘Frontier Arrangements in Fragmented Societies: Ireland and Wales’, inMedieval Frontier Societies, ed. R. Bartlett and A. MacKay (Oxford, 1989). Theargument for seeing the British Isles as a whole as a suitable arena for investigationof lordship and other themes was put forward in his ‘In Praise of British History’,in The British Isles 1100–1500: Comparisons, Contrasts and Connections, ed. R. R.Davies (Edinburgh, 1988). While the British Isles remained the focus of most ofhis publications in the years thereafter, his chronological centre of gravity tendedto shift to a period which ended in the early fourteenth century, and the theme oflordship receded somewhat as issues such as ‘identity’, the rise of English power,and the idea of the medieval ‘state’ came more to the fore. Lords and Lordship,therefore, represents to some extent a return to concerns that had informed alifetime of scholarship but which had yet to be tackled at full, monograph, length.Professor Davies’s early death precluded completion of that project, but enoughsurvives to be published in a book that should meet his goals of encouraging debateand inspiring new questions about a crucial and fascinating historical subject.

I would like to thank Professor Robert Evans and Dr John Watts of OxfordUniversity for inviting me to edit Lords and Lordship, Dr Watts and ProfessorChristine Carpenter for invaluable criticism of both the original text and myapproach to editing it, and Mrs Stephanie Jenkins who typed the original textand at a later stage the final chapter. I would also like to thank Lady Davies, whokindly made available additional important material relating to the book.

Brendan SmithBristol


Apologia

This is a book about aristocratic power or lordship in the British Isles in thelater Middle Ages. ‘Lordship’ as a concept is currently not a common term inEnglish parlance, even in the writings of British medieval historians. This issurprising in at least two respects. First, ‘lordship’, dominium, was a key word inthe political, social, and indeed academic vocabulary of medieval Europe. It wasa ubiquitous and fundamental term, be it (for example) the lordship of God orof the lord king (dominus rex), the lordship of the abbot over his monks, or thelegal power that a husband (seigneur) had over his wife. It was an elastic, proteanword. It could refer to the area over which a lord exercised his dominion—be ita manor, a duchy, or even a kingdom; but it could also be used to characterizeconceptually the nature of that authority. Contemporaries could likewise referto ‘the law of lordship’ (ius dominii) as shorthand for the relationship betweenlord and dependant.¹ Theologians and philosophers argued learnedly about thejustification and credentials of secular lordship (de civili dominio). In short, itwas an infinitely adaptable concept (and word) in the medieval construction ofthe ordering of human relationships and in the justification of the exercise ofpower at all levels of society. But it is not a term which has been much favouredin recent British medieval historiography.

It is different elsewhere. This brings us to the second element of surpriseabout the low profile of the word ‘lordship’ in British medieval historiography.On the continent, notably in France and Germany, ‘seigneurie’ and ‘Herrschaft ’are central terms in historical explanations of the evolution of European society.Thus Marc Bloch in his pioneering chapter in The Cambridge Economic History ofEurope vol. 1 (1941) asserted that ‘for more than a thousand years the seigneuriewas one of the dominant institutions of western civilization.’² More recentlyanother distinguished French medieval historian, Robert Fossier, is, if anything,even more assertive: ‘the seigneurie’, he declares, was ‘the primary organism of

¹ ‘jure dominii’ quoted in R. R. Davies, ‘Lordship or Colony?’ in The English in Medieval Ireland,ed. J. F. Lydon (Dublin, 1984), 142–60, at p. 143.

² M. Bloch, ‘The Rise of Dependent Cultivation and Seigniorial Institutions’, in The CambridgeEconomic History of Europe, vol. I, ed. M. M. Postan, 2nd edn. (Cambridge, 1966), 235–90, atp. 236. Two English historians who have placed ‘lordship’ at the centre of their discussions recentlyare R. H. Britnell, The Commercialisation of English Society, 1000–1500 (Cambridge, 1993) and,seminally, R. Faith, The English Peasantry and the Growth of Lordship (Leicester, 1997).

2 Lords and Lordship

everyday life between the tenth and the eighteenth centuries’.³ Were we to askfor a definition of seigneurie yet another French historian (and a pupil of Bloch),Robert Boutruche, provides a categorical and serviceable answer: ‘Seigneurie is apower of command, constraint and exploitation. It is also the right to exercisesuch power.’⁴ Now it may well be objected that the term ‘lordship’ is a feebleand inadequate translation of the French seigneurie and the German Herrschaft.It also needs to be acknowledged that American historians—notably FredericCheyette and Thomas Bisson—have waged a campaign to move the concept of‘lordship’ nearer to the centre of Anglophone historical discussions of the MiddleAges.⁵ But the relatively low profile of the term, and the concept, in Britishhistoriography calls for a short explanation, if only because it may serve to revealsome of the unspoken assumptions and priorities which underpin historicaldiscourse in Britain. Three reasons at the very least suggest themselves.

First, it may well be that in the profile of the distribution of power, therewas a real difference between Britain, or rather England, and its continentalneighbours in the high and later Middles Ages. England, and to a much lesserdegree Scotland, was a king-centred polity; the influence and power of the kingpenetrated into the crevices of social and political life, directly or indirectly,throughout the country. There were, of course, other nodal points of power;but they were ultimately construed, especially by royal lawyers and apologists,as dependent and contingent upon regal authority and permission. In such aworld the language—at least the legal language—is not that of seigneurie orof haute justice but of quo warranto, liberties, franchises, even palatinates, inother words of a king-centred hierarchy of authority. Any analysis of power(and of its mediators and agents) in such a world starts, and not infrequentlyends, with royal lordship. Such an approach works less successfully in Scotland(in spite of a tendency in some Scottish historiography to imitate the English‘paradigm’). It is even less appropriate, indeed misleading, as a set of assumptionsfor understanding the nature of power in medieval Wales and Ireland, includingthose areas under English control.

A second, associated reason for the scant attention paid to lordship in Britishmedieval historiography may well rest in the nature of the sources. Historiansare much more in thrall to their sources than they often realize. Indeed, theirdependence grows as the volume of surviving written sources increases, as it doesin particular from the late twelfth century. No country has been blessed withsuch an exceptionally rich and unbroken series of archives as England. Manyof those archives are ecclesiastical; others are seigniorial or urban. But far andaway the richest collections of records are those of the king and his servants;

³ R. Fossier, ‘Seigneurs et Seigneuries au Moyen Age’, in Seigneurs et Seigneuries au Moyen Age(Actes de 117e congres des societes savant) (Paris, 1995), 9–20, at p. 9.

⁴ R. Boutruche, Seigneurie et Feodalite 2 vols. (Paris, 1959–1970), II, 83.⁵ F. L. Cheyette (ed.), Lordship and Community in Medieval Europe: Selected Readings (Hunting-

don, New York,1968); T. M. Bisson, ‘Medieval Lordship’, Speculum, 70 (1995), 743–59.

Apologia 3

they are unparalleled in their volume and detail and many of them have beenconveniently calendared or edited for historians. They are normally the mostnatural and rewarding point of entry for historical research, be it at national,regional, or local level. It is a situation without parallel in most continentalcountries; it bespeaks the power and penetration of kingship. But it is as well toremember that even in England such documents present a view of power andsociety as seen through royal spectacles. No one would deny the importance ofthat view; but in any balanced and rounded appreciation of the exercise of powerin medieval society, it falls very far short of the whole truth. It is a partial view; itspartiality can occasionally appear all the more disturbing since there is in generala huge imbalance in the quantity and even quality of royal and non-royal sourcesfor the study of the exercise of power in medieval Britain. It is the royal sourceswhich are best placed to set the agenda and shape the assumptions.

But there is at least one other reason why an analysis of lordship has not onthe whole figured prominently in British academic historiography, especially incomparison with the way that the nature of seigneurie often dominates the serriedranks of great French provincial studies from at least the time of Georges Duby’sepoch-making study of the Maconnais (1953), or with the degree to which long-term analysis of the nature and manifestations of Herrschaft has been a leadingpreoccupation of medieval historians in Germany.⁶ The writings of historians areshaped not only, or indeed not mainly, by the sources on which they draw but bythe organizing principles, metaphors, and explanatory frameworks which informand structure their accounts. Such principles, metaphors, and frameworks arepart of their inherited intellectual and indeed professional agenda. They may addto or even challenge part of such an agenda; but the agenda shapes the questionsasked and the answers given to a far greater extent than is normally recognized. Itis difficult to suppress the suspicion that English historiography has given priorityto issues other than lordship, such as state- and nation-formation, constitutionaland institutional development, political structures and friction, crown–magnaterelationships, and so forth. The importance of these issues is not, of course, opento question; but it is at least arguable that a more nuanced understanding of thedistribution of power in medieval society in the British Isles needs to pay moreattention to the role of non-royal power alongside the undoubted strength andpenetration of kingship. That is part of the aim of this book.

Power, of course, is exercised by a whole host of agents at every level ofsociety. Next to the king, it was the greater lay aristocracy which was the

⁶ G. Duby, La Societe aux xie et xiie siecles dans la Region Maconnaise (Paris, 1953); O. Brunner,Land and Lordship: Structures of Governance in Medieval Austria (Philadelphia, 1984) in Englishtranslation with introduction by Howard Kaminsky and James Van Horn Melton. For commentsee 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 HornMelton (Cambridge, 1994), 263–97.


major wielder of power, lordship, in medieval society, as indeed in the ancienregime world generally. Indeed one historian has shrewdly observed that medievalEngland—that prototype of strong national monarchy in the textbooks—canbest be characterized as ‘an aristocracy which was kingship-focussed’.⁷ If that isindeed the case—as I believe it to be—then characterizing the nature of thelordship of this aristocracy may help to give us a more rounded understandingof the distribution and exercise of power—‘the power of command, constraintand exploitation’, in Boutruche’s phrase—in medieval society.

The aristocracy has often received a poor press from historians. This may bein part because, at least in Britain, its power was still so dominant socially andpolitically until the early twentieth century that it called for no explanation oranalysis. Familiarity turned to contempt as the aristocracy came to be identifiedas privileged bulwarks standing in the way of political and social progress. Theycame to be branded historiographically and politically as ‘feudal reactionaries’;their opposition and privileges inhibited the development of strong kingshipand centralized, unitary state power, so often characterized by historians asthe beneficent goals of true political and social progress. It was little wonderthat K. B. McFarlane in his epoch-making Ford Lectures in 1953 uttered hisfamous jibe that English historians had been ‘King’s Friends’ and, by implication,enemies or at least detractors of the aristocracy.⁸ He set out to redress the balance(building in part on the work of other scholars such as F. M. Stenton andNoel Denholm-Young for the pre-1300 period) and did so triumphantly. It isgiven to few scholars to transform the landscape of our understanding of a pastsociety; Bruce McFarlane did so with regard to the later Middle Ages in England,specifically the role of the lay aristocracy in its society and polity.

Since McFarlane’s seminal work, the late medieval aristocracy of the BritishIsles can no longer claim to suffer from historiographical neglect. On the contraryit has been the subject of a great deal of high-quality work from a variety ofangles—be they detailed studies of individual magnates such as Aymer deValence, earl of Pembroke (d. 1324), Thomas, earl of Lancaster (d. 1322), orHenry of Grosmont, duke of Lancaster (d. 1361), or collective studies of greataristocratic families, such as the Staffords and the Percies.⁹ Detailed studies ofvarious aspects of aristocratic life and power have proliferated, exploring suchissues as the organization of aristocratic estates and households, the character and

⁷ D. A. L. Morgan, ‘The King’s Affinity in the Polity of Yorkist England’, TRHS, 5th ser., vol. 23(1973), 1–25 at p. 1.

⁸ McFarlane, Nobility, 2.⁹ The following studies, cited in chronological order of appearance, may serve as examples:

J. M. W. Bean, The Estates of the Percy Family 1416–1537 (Oxford, 1958); K. A. Fowler,The King’s Lieutenant: Henry of Grosmont, First Duke of Lancaster 1310–1361 (London, 1969);J. R. Maddicott, Thomas of Lancaster 1307–22: A Study in the Reign of Edward II (Oxford, 1970);J. R. S. Phillips, Aymer de Valence, Earl of Pembroke, 1307–1324: Baronial Politics in the Reign ofEdward II (Oxford, 1972); C. Rawcliffe, The Staffords: Earls of Stafford and Dukes of Buckingham1394–1521 (Cambridge, 1978).

Apologia 5

composition of aristocratic affinities and their role in the phenomenon knownunhelpfully as ‘bastard feudalism’, the elaboration of legal devices to controlthe descent of aristocratic estates, and the role of aristocratic women, especiallywidows and heiresses. The power of the greater magnates in English local societyhas been brought under the searchlight of numerous county studies, which revealits extent and limitations by locating it within a wide social context of the countycommunity and by bringing into clearer focus the standing and connections ofthe ‘greater county gentry’.¹⁰ All in all, our understanding and knowledge of thelater medieval aristocracy is much more thorough, complex, and nuanced thanit once was. This is particularly true of later medieval England and is reflected inseveral notable recent attempts to provide a sophisticated overview of aristocraticpower based on these detailed studies.¹¹ Elsewhere in the British Isles, wherethe materials for such detailed studies are less ample, significant strides have alsobeen made in studying the nature of aristocratic power in the March of Wales,Scotland, and English Ireland.¹²

This book builds on this remarkable historiographical achievement, as it doeson an older antiquarian tradition of assembling details of the personal and familyhistories of the aristocracy—from the time of William Dugdale’s pioneering TheBaronage of England (1675–6) to the invaluable The Complete Peerage of England,Scotland, Ireland etc. (1910–59) and, most recently, The Oxford Dictionary ofNational Biography (2004). But its focus is, in some respects, different. It doesnot attend at length to many of the issues which have, very properly, commandedthe attention of historians, especially English historians, of late—issues such asthe nature of ‘bastard feudal’ relationships, the role of the aristocracy in ‘county’society, the definition of a hereditary parliamentary peerage, or crown–magnaterelationships. It will no doubt touch on many of these issues; but its primary aimis 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 approachis thematic and analytical. There is, of course, a price to be paid for such anapproach (as for all historical approaches), especially in terms of overlooking theparticular circumstances and contexts of individual aristocratic families and of

¹⁰ Notable examples, from a long list, are: N. Saul, Knights and Esquires: The GloucestershireGentry in the Fourteenth Century (Oxford, 1981); S. J. Payling, Political Society in LancastrianEngland: 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 Huntingdon1152–1219: A Study in Anglo-Scottish History (Edinburgh, 1985); Essays on the Nobility of MedievalScotland, ed. K. J. Stringer (Edinburgh, 1985); J. Wormald, Lords and Men in Scotland: Bonds ofManrent, 1442–1603 (Edinburgh, 1985); M. H. Brown, The Black Douglases: War and Lordshipin Late Medieval Scotland, 1300–1455 (East Linton, 1998); R. Frame, English Lordship in Ireland1318–61 (Oxford, 1981).


underestimating the possible changes in the character of aristocratic lordship overtime. But this—so it seems to me—is a price worth paying in trying to take thesubject forward at this particular historiographical juncture.

The word ‘lordship’, dominium, was still ubiquitous in the social and conceptu-al vocabulary of later medieval Europe. Its very imprecision was in this respect itsstrength. It may well be that its relative unpopularity in current British medievalhistoriography is explained in part by its elasticity and vagueness, indeed its ambi-guity, as a term. But at least it helps us to construe medieval society in some degreeon its own terms and through its own lenses. Reconstructing the assumptionsand language of that thought-world may help the historian to avoid some of thetraps that beset him when he uses the terminology, analogies, and metaphors ofthe modern world—including the burgeoning of uniform state institutions andnotions of sovereignty, accountability, and delegation of power—to characterizea medieval world which was, arguably, much more plural and disordered in itsassumptions about power. As Karl Leyser once shrewdly observed of medievalGermany; ‘there was a teeming welter of developing princely and aristocraticlordships, lay and clerical, a bewildering variety of substructures; . . . they didnot possess any common underlying grid or shared development and relativeuniformities.’¹³ That may not correspond to the situation in England (thoughthe cultivated uniformity of English power structures is itself a historical mirage);but it may be a more appropriate point of departure for the characterization oflordship in the British Isles as a whole. Not the least of the advantages of therecent attempt to promote a comparative study of the medieval British Isles isthat it serves to draw attention to the distinctiveness of medieval England, ratherthan regarding it as necessarily a norm or prototype.¹⁴

Lordship, so we quoted Robert Boutruche above, ‘is a power of command,constraint and exploitation. It is also the right to exercise such power’.¹⁵ Butthe ways in which power manifests itself and exercises its command are not inthe least uniform. They are as variable as are the whole host of chronological,geographical, economic, and social matrices in which they operate. They rangefrom the kind of intensive lordship that a lord exercised over his household or amanorial seigneur over his serfs to what has been called the extensive, tributarylordship which bound lords and communities in large swathes of upland Britain.Thus the kind of precise, intrusive and richly documented lordship which thebishop of Winchester exercised on his great manor of Taunton (Somerset) isvery different in kind and intensity from the lordship of the Campbell lords of

¹³ K. Leyser, ‘Frederick Barbarossa and the Hohenstaufen Polity’, Viator, 19 (1988), 153–76,quote at p. 157.

¹⁴ Superb examples of reading ‘behind’ the official government records to the realities of poweron 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 Pastand Present, 76 (1977), 3–33.

¹⁵ Above, p. 2.

Apologia 7

the western Highlands of Scotland or of the lords of the March over much ofupland Wales. Yet our analysis of lordship needs to encompass the whole rangeof ways in which lordship, notably aristocratic lordship, manifested itself. Wemust not necessarily privilege the lowland, manorial lordship of southern andmidland England simply because of its rich documentary detritus.

A sensitivity to the chronological and geographical varieties of lordship withinthe British Isles should also help us to focus on some of the long-term featuresof lordship as a way of structuring power in medieval society. We must notbe constrained unduly or myopically by the confines of the late medievaldocumentary evidence. The roots of lordship lay deep in medieval society. In latemedieval England many of those roots had been overlain (though not necessarilytotally hidden) by the development of royal, governmental, and communalinstitutions; but their importance for a rounded understanding of the reach andtexture of medieval lordship remains. Lordship, including non-royal lordship,was ultimately founded on the personal control of men, on a psychology ofdependence and beholdenness which applied throughout medieval society. Thatis why the first act of lordship was to demand a visual oath of fealty (possiblyaccompanied by an act of homage) from those who entered into dependence.Personal dependence was primary. That is why the strength of lordship in muchof highland Britain was measured in the number of men it could command—say2,000—rather than in rent income or landed estate;¹⁶ that is why again thefirst act of a lord was to go on a ‘progress’ through his ‘country’ and to exacthomage ‘with hands raised and joined unanimously’ from his dependants.¹⁷ Thatis why they were, and were called, his ‘subjects’, not simply his ‘tenants’.¹⁸ Thatis why when the bond of manrent emerged as part of the contractual world offifteenth-century Scotland it was the bond between man and lord which was atits kernel.¹⁹ It is a reminder to us that there were features about the characterand assumptions of lordship which lie beyond the shallows of the documentaryevidence, and beyond the world-view of royal sources.

The chronological bookends of the study are the years 1272 and 1422. Thechoice of period needs a word of explanation. Apart from the pleasing symmetryof a period of a century and a half, there are—it has to be admitted—verypersonal, even selfish, reasons for the choice. First, it is the period with which I ammost familiar since my earliest studies over forty years ago (under the directionof K. B. McFarlane) of the lordship of the Bohun and Lancaster families in theMarch of Wales. The study of aristocratic lordship has by no means been my main

¹⁶ Thus when Walter Bower in his Scotichronicon (ed. D. E. R. Watt, et al. 9 vols. (Aberdeen,1987–97), VIII, 260–1) compiled a list of Highland chiefs for 1429 he appended an estimate oftheir 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.


scholarly preoccupation during my academic lifetime; but it has been an abidinginterest, sufficiently so for me to consider trying to distil my understanding,imperfect as it is, of its nature. Second, there is the issue of manageability. Part ofthe appeal of king-centred English (or Scottish) history is that one can constructa single storyline around one king at a time. Twelfth-century historians hadrecognized how much of a boon this was: so it was that Henry of Huntingdonheaved a huge sigh of historiographical relief when the day arrived when Englandwas under a single king.²⁰ Historical construction was thereby greatly simplified.The historian of the medieval aristocracy enjoys no such luxury. Rather is heconfronted by the dilemmas of multiplicity of dealing (to take England’s caseonly) with some twenty earls and about sixty peerage families at any given time.The most favoured solution to this dilemma has been to opt for the detailedmonographic study of a single magnate or an aristocratic family. The alternativeis a broad-brush characterization of the aristocracy as a group, thereby permittingbroad generalizations, sometimes garnished with individual examples. My ownapproach in the current work lies between these polarities. Its starting point isthe careers, interests, and documents of individual magnates and their families,but its declared purpose is to distil this information to try to characterize thenature of aristocratic lordship generally. Such an exercise in characterization canonly be attempted by a rather ruthless process of selection and organization; thatalone makes the subject manageable.

There is a third, less selfish reason for choosing the period 1272–1422 asthe focus of study. It is truly the first age of detailed documentation for thestudy of the medieval aristocracy, especially in England. It is neither the heroicnor the really formative age in the shaping of aristocratic power. That accolademust surely go—as continental historians have so rightly insisted—to the period1000–1250.²¹ Pioneering studies of lordship in England in this period have beenundertaken by a roll call of historians such as Sir Frank Stenton, S. F. C. Milsom,Sydney Painter, David Crouch, Diana Greenway, Barbara English, Judith Green,and others. In Scotland scholars such as Grant Simpson and Keith Stringer havelikewise shown what rich insights into aristocratic power and affinities in thetwelfth and thirteenth centuries can be secured through the detailed analysisof the careers and charters of individual magnates. We appear to be presentedwith a paradox: in England, at least, the seigniorial world—if such it was—ofF. M. Stenton’s First Century of English Feudalism or S. F. C. Milsom’s legalworld²² seems to give way in the thirteenth century to a world much moredominated by monarchical structures, national identities, unitary governmental

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

²¹ See especially the essays by Fossier and Contamine in Seigneurs et Seigneuries au Moyen Age(Actes de 117e congres des societes savant) (Paris, 1995).

²² F. M. Stenton, The First Century of English Feudalism, 2nd edn. (Oxford, 1961); S. F.C. Milsom, The Legal Framework of English Feudalism (Cambridge, 1976).

Apologia 9

institutions, a growing distinction between the sphere of ‘the public’ and ‘theprivate’, and what has been called the rise of the modern state. Why, therefore,deploy as a tool of analysis a term—lordship—which was apparently becomingincreasingly outmoded?

A large part of the answer lies in the undoubted fact that the quality andquantity of documentation for the study of lordship in action grows by leapsand bounds after c.1250. Up to that point it is through charters—documentsmainly concerned with the title to, and transfer of, land—that these studies haveoverwhelmingly, though not exclusively, viewed their subject. In this respectthere is a quantum leap, especially in England, in the range and character ofdocumentary sources for the study of aristocratic power from the mid to latethirteenth century onwards. Manorial accounts and surveys, household accounts,receivers’ accounts and valors, court rolls, registers of correspondence, indenturesof personal service, and muster lists now survive in considerable numbers. Theirsurvival is indeed very patchy, especially as compared with royal archives, andvery uneven as between the major aristocratic families. But they allow us tostudy lordship in detail and in action in a fashion that is not at all possible forearlier periods. This rich cache of sources continues after 1422; but some ofthem become increasingly stilted, even uninformative and new genres of evidencebegin to accumulate.

Now that the chronological limitations of the book have been explained, itis equally important to note the selective group of lords who are chosen foranalysis. One deliberate omission is the great ecclesiastical lords. There is, ofcourse, no doubt that they were often drawn from the same social stock as theirlay colleagues and exercised a range of powers of lordship which were very similar.Thus William Courtenay and Thomas Arundel, two successive archbishops ofCanterbury 1381–96, 1396–7, and 1399–1414, were younger sons of notablecomital families and fully familiar with the habits and priorities of the layaristocracy. Nor would Abbot Clowne of St Mary’s, Leicester, or Abbot Thomasde la Mare of St Albans—both of whom have been memorably characterized inthe chronicles of their abbeys—have felt in any way ill at ease in the companyand conversation of earls and barons. There were around 1300 some fifteenbishops and thirty abbots and priors who had the same order of wealth and muchthe same powers of lordship as the major secular lords of England. None of thiscan be gainsaid; yet—issues of manageability apart—the differences between theecclesiastical and lay aristocracy were profound, especially in terms of the themesof this book—be it in family policy and priorities, the institutional context inwhich they operated, their role in local and national politics, their social andmilitary contacts, and so forth.

Even when the ecclesiastical lords have been excluded, there is the vexingquestion of how we define the lay aristocracy. ‘Aristocracy’ and ‘nobility’ are—atleast in Britain—ill-defined and elastic terms; qualifying them as ‘greater’ or‘higher’ still falls short of providing clarity of definition. ‘Nobility’ in particular


can be extended as a term to include arguably all members of ‘gentle’ society, atleast those who adopted the style of ‘knight’ and family coats of arms. Arguablyeven more important is the undoubted fact that the powers of lordship exercisedby lords, great and small, were broadly similar in character. Particularly is thistrue of the dozen or so elite gentry families so characteristic of many Englishshires and composing an intermediate group between the greater barons on theone hand and the manorial or parish gentry on the other. In certain respects itis the continuum in the exercise and character of lordship—from that of thegreatest earl to the two- or three-manor county knight—which is one of themost distinctive features of medieval and early modern society. They were alllords, domini, seigneurs.

Indeed it can be argued that in aggregate terms it was the lesser lords ratherthan the great earls and barons who dominated the landscape of local society. TheEnglish evidence is particularly striking in this respect. J. M. W. Bean has pointedout that, of the seventeen counties for which comparison can be made based onthe 1412 tax returns, in only four did the proportion of the landed values held bythe peerage or higher aristocracy exceed 25 per cent; in none did it reach 30 percent.²³ Or to put it more positively, the great majority of gentle landowners heldland with an annual return of £20–£39. Side by side with these bold statisticalclaims, we can place the series of country and family studies—of which those ofNigel Saul have been outstanding examples²⁴—which have greatly enhanced ourunderstanding of the role of the greater gentry in the social and power structuresof provincial England and, by extension, to some degree of the lairds of lowlandScotland, the second-rank families of English Ireland such as the Le Poers or theRoches, or even of the leaders of native society in highland Britain such as theuchelwyr of Wales. These men were no pawns; their power and standing werepart of the matrix within which lordship, both aristocratic and royal, had to learnto operate. Not the least of the achievements of recent scholarship has been toshow that even great magnates such as John of Gaunt, duke of Lancaster, foundtheir power in the localities severely constrained by the existing distribution andambitions of local lordship and families.²⁵

All this is readily conceded; lordship spans the whole of the ruling class orclasses of medieval society. It may have been displayed in all its finery andsophistication in the world of earls and barons; but in its fustian form it servedequally well to describe the power of the countless lesser lords of the BritishIsles. Yet that is but one half of the argument. It is equally undoubtedly truethat lordship was stratified in a clearly recognized hierarchical form. This was

²³ J. M. W. Bean, ‘Landlords’, in The Agrarian History of England and Wales, III, 1348–1500,ed. E. Miller (Cambridge, 1991), 526–86, at p. 530.

²⁴ N. Saul, Scenes from Provincial Life: Knightly Families in Sussex, 1280–1400 (Oxford, 1986);N. Saul, Death, Art, and Memory in Medieval England: The Cobham Family and their Monuments,1300–1500 (Oxford, 1990).

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

Apologia 11

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 codeof chivalry, knighthood, and gentility, they were under no illusions about theprofound divisions in their ranks in terms of wealth, status, and political weight.Magna Carta c.14 in 1215 had acknowledged as much by its differentiationbetween those lords who were given the privilege of an individual summons tomeet the king in ‘common council’ from those who had to make do with ageneral summons through the sheriff of their county. Already by the 1230s andthe 1240s the notion of a ‘peerage’, an elite group of lords, was in circulation,and some of the earliest Rolls of Arms likewise identified the most prestigiousfamilies, about one hundred in number.²⁶

This process of the definition of an elite of higher aristocrats—what K. B.McFarlane termed the ‘stratification of the nobility’²⁷—gathered institutionalpace in our period. Its most obvious expression was the growing definitionof a hereditary parliamentary peerage. Whereas in the late thirteenth centurythe numbers of magnates who were summoned individually to parliament wasstill fluid and somewhat unpredictable, this increasingly ceased to be so as thefourteenth century progressed. Already by Edward II’s reign the number of earlsand barons receiving individual writs of summons to the English parliamentwas beginning to settle down at about sixty. No property qualification was laiddown for the group—though a thousand marks of landed income was comingto be regarded as the territorial competence for an earl—but we would not befar wrong to suggest, with Barbara Harvey, that landed income of c.£400 perannum was the threshold.²⁸ This, therefore, was the creme de la creme of thenobility; and they were aware, increasingly so, that they stood apart.

Stand apart, head and shoulders above the rest of gentle society, they mostcertainly did. That is why Rodney Hilton’s analogy of them as skyscrapersstanding out from the plain of the other lords, local and regional, remainsapposite. The figures that can be culled from the 1436 income tax returns makeevident the huge economic gulf between the peerage and the gentry.²⁹ Nor wasit merely or even mainly a matter of income and statistics. The greater lordsenjoyed a range of privileges to which few ordinary lords could aspire—such as

²⁶ D. Crouch, The Image of Aristocracy in Britain, 1000–1300 (London, 1992), esp. 22–5, 105.²⁷ McFarlane, Nobility, 122–5.²⁸ B. Harvey, ‘The Aristocratic Consumer in England in the Long Thirteenth Century’, in

Thirteenth Century England VI, ed. M. Prestwich, R. Britnell, and R. Frame (Woodbridge, 1997),17–37.

²⁹ R. H. Hilton, A Medieval Society: The West Midlands at the End of the Thirteenth Century(London, 1967). Hilton’s metaphor is an exact echo of that used by John Stafford, archbishopof Canterbury 1443–51, who likened the nobility to mountains towering above the hills andplains 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.


the right to license markets and fairs in their own boroughs, the right to freewarren on their demesnes, licences to empark their lands, and often extensivejurisdictional franchises. But it was perhaps above all their lifestyle and socialcircles which proclaimed their superiority and the distance between them andother wielders of lordship. They operated on a national, sometimes indeed aninternational, stage; they were the companions of kings and captains of theirarmies; the size and splendour of their households put them in a league apart, asdid the size of their affinities and the tentacles of their influence and power; theirmarriage alliances to their social peers further promoted their apartness, whilethe wide distribution of their estates and residences—not infrequently extendinginto England, Wales, and Ireland—reaffirmed their national, as well as theirlocal or even regional, standing.

Those who were not members of this magic circle fully recognized thesuperiority of the group and the due deference that was owed to it. Thus whenSir Hugh Hastings commissioned a brass in the late 1340s for his greater gloryin the church of Elsing in Norfolk it was the king and great lords whom hehad served who were commemorated—Edward III, the earls of Warwick andPembroke, the Lords Stafford and Despenser among them.³⁰ This was not mereflattery; rather was it a recognition that this was how the world of power was, andshould be, constructed with lesser lords turning in the orbit of the greater onesand basking in their patronage. Much the same point is made even more vividlymanifest in the famous, and highly revealing, set of windows at Etchingham inSussex. The king and members of the royal family are given pride of place inthe east window of the nave; they are flanked by the earls of England, probablyall twelve of them; Sir William Etchingham relegated his knightly neighboursto the nave.³¹ Contemporaries, in short, would not have been surprised by theprominence we give to the great lords; it reflects their view of the world.

In this analysis of lordship there is a further reason for concentrating on thegreater lords—indeed on a handful of them. It is quite simply that, on the whole,it is only for this group of lords that we have a range of documentary evidence onwhich to build a nuanced understanding of the exercise of lordship in the longfourteenth century. This is surely no accident. Rather it is that the sheer extent andcomplexity of their estates and households required them from a fairly early dateto use written records to supervise and control their affairs.³² The historian is thebeneficiary of this triumph of the written word in the seigniorial world, notablyin the appearance of annual accounts. In fact such records as survive are only the

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

³¹ Fully discussed in Saul, Scenes from Provincial Life, ch. 5.³² There are excellent introductions to seigniorial household and manorial accounts respectively

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

Apologia 13

tips of a much larger iceberg of lost documents. That is why the analysis in thechapters which follow relies heavily on a few relatively well-documented Englisharistocratic families—notably the Beauchamps, Bohuns, Fitzalans, Lancasters,Mortimers, and Staffords, supplemented occasionally from the archives of otherfamilies.³³ The search of such records could no doubt have been greatly extendedand deepened; but the sample is—it is hoped—sufficiently broad to allow usto characterize the main lineaments of aristocratic lordship in the fourteenthcentury.

Of the six major English families mentioned above, all held extensive lands inthe March of Wales as well as in England; the Mortimers also had very extensiveinterests in Ireland. This directs us to another feature of this book which calls forexplanation and defence, namely its ambition to draw on evidence for the studyof aristocratic lordship from different parts of the British Isles. First, a disclaimer.The book has no pretensions whatsoever to make an original contribution to thestudy of aristocratic power in Scotland or English Ireland nor, frankly, are thesurviving records—especially household and estate accounts—for these regionsto be compared with those for England or even the March of Wales. Nor have Iattempted to characterize the nature of noble power in the native ‘Celtic’ societiesof Wales, Ireland, and Scotland. Some excellent studies have been undertakenof late in this area; but these will only be drawn upon here to characterizehow ‘English-style’ aristocratic lordship sought to adjust to the social landscapeof ‘Celtic’ societies.³⁴ In other respects the patterns and dynamics of power,compounded by the very different and very inadequate range of sources, donot lend themselves to meaningful comparison with ‘English-style’ aristocraticlordship or its terminology.

Nevertheless there are good reasons (other than the pursuit of current histori-ographical fashion) for extending the scope of this study beyond the confines ofEngland. We should observe, first, that the great lords of England, the Marchof Wales, and English Ireland were, in many respects, members of a singleclub, bound by ties of marriage, sociability, territorial ambition, and service.³⁵A handful of illustrative examples may drive home the point. Territorially, thelanded interests of William de Valence (d. 1296), half-brother of King Henry III,are indicative: he held Goodrich Castle (Herefordshire), estates in twelve Englishcounties (especially in southern England), a share of the lordship of Pembroke

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

³⁴ A notable study is K. Simms, From Kings to Warlords: The Changing Structure of Gaelic Irelandin the Later Middle Ages (Woodbridge, 1987).

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


in west Wales, and the lordship of Wexford in south-east Ireland. The marriagealliances of Richard de Burgh, earl of Ulster (d. 1326), whom we will meetbelow, likewise illustrate the ecumenical links of these great magnates. Of five ofhis daughters, he married one to an English earl, another to a Scottish earl, anda further three to major Anglo-Irish earls. Earl Richard’s military career likewiseunderlines the fact that the stage on which these leading families conductedtheir public careers was a British or even a European one: he was summoned totake troops to Wales, Scotland, and Gascony just as his contemporary, John fitzThomas, served in Flanders and Scotland.³⁶ Ultimately the focal point of theworld of these men—where their fortunes were made and unmade—was thecourt of the king of England. It was he who could even instruct them whom tomarry and it was from the ranks of leading English magnates that they chosetheir sureties when faced with political disaster. Whatever the differences in thelandscape of power, there was a continuum in their aristocratic world which ourhistorical analysis should serve to respect.

Scotland was different: the pattern of its great provincial earldoms and lordshipswas, in many respects, quite distinct from that of England and the evolutionof notions of peerage did not march in step with the English story.³⁷ Moreimportant, Scottish aristocracy had its own focal point—socially, militarily,and institutionally—in the court and power of the king of Scots. It was amuch smaller and much less tightly textured circle of power than that of theEnglish, Marcher, and Anglo-Irish world; but it was at least a separate orbit.Yet the Scottish experience should not lie altogether outwith the scope of thisanalysis. Recent studies (especially by Keith Stringer) have emphasized thata not inconsiderable number of Scottish lords held estates in England or inUlster, at least until the breach inaugurated by the Wars of Independence in1296. The continuum and contrasts in the exercise of lordship across nationalboundaries—as was vividly shown in Stringer’s analysis of the lordship of EarlDavid of Huntingdon in the English east Midlands and Garioch (Scotland)—inthemselves provide a valuable insight into the varying character of aristocraticpower.³⁸

This is, indeed, ultimately the defence for casting our net widely in the BritishIsles in pursuit of our characterization of aristocratic lordship. There is, of course,no doubt that the quality and quantity of historical evidence for the study ofaristocratic power 1272–1422 is infinitely superior for England than for anyother part of the British Isles. But it is evidence of a particular kind—mainly

³⁶ ODNB, sub ‘Burgh, Richard de’; ‘Fitzgerald, John fitz Thomas’.³⁷ Alexander Grant has published a series of fundamental studies of the later medieval Scottish

aristocracy, including ‘Earls and Earldoms in Late Medieval Scotland, c.1310–1460’, in EssaysPresented to Michael Roberts, ed. J. Bossy and P. Jupp (Belfast, 1976), 24–40; ‘The Development ofthe 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 andH. L. MacQueen (Edinburgh, 1996). For Stringer’s studies see above, n. 12.

Apologia 15

of lowland, manor-centred lordship, an aristocratic power already substantiallyfossilized in its forms and, crucially, operating within a framework of strong andintrusive royal control and within complex societies in terms of the distributionof social, jurisdictional, and political power. It is an image of aristocratic lordshipwhich is reflected likewise in other parts, especially anglicized parts, of the lowlandBritish Isles—be it in the lowlands of Glamorgan, Gwent, and Pembroke inWales, in the rich valleys of south-east Ireland or of Meath, and in tracts oflowland southern and eastern Scotland. But it is an image which needs to besupplemented by considering the character of lordship in upland regions ofthe British Isles, including much of the north of England, and in areas wherenon-English societies preserved the forms and organization of native lordship,and where powers of direct royal intervention and control were limited. Not onlydoes this alternative image help to give geographical nuance to our portrait ofaristocratic lordship in the British Isles, it also extends greatly our understandingof the range and character of lordship itself. It helps us to recognize what aprotean and flexible institution aristocratic lordship was.

It is the nature of the power exercised by this elite group which is primarilythe subject of this current study. Lordship, particularly that of great lords, wasultimately more than exploitation or power, even if it was most certainly thatalso. Its legitimacy derived from its claim that it afforded maintenance andprotection, ‘good lordship’ as it would be known in later medieval centuries.It was a reminder that there was a mutuality at the heart of lordship and a setof social obligations which both parties were expected to observe. We may citean example of such mutuality, and of its limits, from the north-east March ofWales. Thomas of Lancaster (d. 1322), the most powerful aristocratic lord ofhis day, sent a letter to the men of the lordship of Bromfield and Yale around1318 promising to be ‘a good lord to them’; but, with his usual gruffness, therewas a sting in the tail of his offer: ‘he has sworn that he will have them one wayor another.’ The community sized up the threat realistically. They calculated,rightly, that their current lord, John de Warenne, earl of Surrey (d. 1347), was nomatch for Lancaster in ‘power’; but they also added, revealingly, that they would‘be ready with their bodies to maintain his honour, if they but have a leader whomight defend them’.³⁹ They were fully apprised of the dynamics and duties oflordship and dependence alike. Glanvill in his treatise on the laws of Englandwas eloquent on that score c.1180: ‘What the man owes to the lord because ofhis homage is also owed by the lord to his man because of lordship, except fordeference alone.’⁴⁰ Much of this mutuality may have been ironed out in England,especially lowland England, by the institutionalization and territorialization of

³⁹ Cal. Anc. Pets., no. 8829.⁴⁰ Glanvill, Tractatus de Legibus et Consuetudinibus Regni Anglie, ed. G. D. G. Hall (London,

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


the obligations of dependence and by the common wash of royal institutions andclaims; but elsewhere in the British Isles the patriarchal, personal, and protectionfeatures were still evident and operative. We need to try to capture some of thesefeatures as we seek to trace the varying contours and practice of lordship acrossthe face of the late medieval British Isles. We are so used to assessing power andits effectiveness in governmental, bureaucratic, economic, and narrowly politicalterms that we are in danger of overlooking—or underestimating—the range ofattributes and claims which lay at the heart of medieval lordship. These attributesand claims are not itemized in the charters, accounts, and registers of lordshipeven in the later Middle Ages; but they form the foundations on which the wholeedifice of lordship—including ultimately royal lordship—was founded. Threeof them in particular may be briefly identified.

Lordship was part of the natural order of the universe. The lordship of menon earth corresponded to that of the Lord God. Its legitimacy was not normallyopen to doubt. English kings, and historians, may have made a great deal of thephrase ‘by the grace of God’ in their formal titles; but since all the powers thatbe are ultimately ordained by God, that same grace was the source likewise ofaristocratic lordship, indeed of all lordship (as theologians such as John Wycliffnever tired of declaring). This was not merely a matter of schoolmen’s talk.Rather was it the way in which the proper ordering of the world and society wasinterpreted. The values of this world were manifested—in a fashion which it isvery difficult for the modern mind to grasp—in the exalted position accorded tothose who, literally and metaphorically, lorded over it. What great lords expectedultimately was nothing less than worship, precisely what the believer owed to theLord God. The hugely inflated formulae of address—both of letters issued bythem and petitions addressed to them—open a window onto this world. ‘Ryghthigh and mighty prynce and my right good lord’ is how the earl of Oxfordaddressed the powerful duke of Norfolk; more modestly Edward Despenser,lord of Glamorgan, was ‘illustrious and magnificent lord’.⁴¹ The habit had alsocaught on in Scotland, as the letters to the members of the Douglas familyamply illustrate: ‘most excellent and most dread lord, James earl of Douglas’is one example of the fashion.⁴² We can dismiss such hyperbolic formulae aspart of the inevitable inflation of language; but we would be wrong to do so.Not only do the formulae reflect the self-image of the aristocrats themselves(or their chancery clerks); they also remind us that the world of lordship wasfounded on a defiantly hierarchical world order. Lordship was not only a matterof power, land, and income; it was also based on a particular view of the socialand political order.

⁴¹ The Paston Letters, 1422–1509, ed. J. Gairdner, 3 vols. (London, 1910), I, 143; ‘PrivateIndentures’, no. 57.

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

Apologia 17

The other side of the coin to ‘worship’ was ‘deference’. The vocabulary ofsubordination echoes throughout the documents: ‘honour’, ‘reverence’, ‘right’,‘obedience’, ‘humility’.⁴³ So does the vocabulary of obedience, even at the higherechelons of social dependence. ‘I will do in all and singular’, said an Irishchieftain as he submitted in 1394, ‘that which a good and faithful liegemanought to do and is bound to do to his natural liege lord’.⁴⁴ Again we candismiss such phraseology as conventional flattery. But not only does it pervademedieval sources—from feudal charters to manorial formulae and indentures ofretinue—it also opens a window on the, often unspoken, set of assumptionswhich shaped all relationships of dependence. The return on ‘worship’ was ‘goodlordship’, ‘bone seigneurie’, ‘la meilleure seigneurie et bienveillaunce’.⁴⁵ And, as theduke of Norfolk said in a famous letter, the goodness or ‘power’ of the lordship heexercised in his ‘schir’ operated ‘at all tymes . . . thowh our persone be not daylyher’.⁴⁶ This was the framework within which all lordship ultimately brought itsauthority to bear on society. We must not lose sight of this framework as weattend to the particularities and details of aristocratic lordship in action.

Finally the term ‘lordship’ reminds us of the open-ended and multifacetednature of the exercise of power in the Middle Ages. Historians have dividedtheir current analysis of power into compartments—social, political, economic,and so forth; they have drawn a sharp division between so-called ‘public’ and‘private’ power; they have arranged their scheme of power within clear-cutinstitutional and governmental frameworks. In so far as the concept of ‘lordship’has survived this assault, it has been largely reduced to a rent-collecting lordship,stripped of its social, judicial, or political overtones. Such was not medievallordship. The great F. W. Maitland knew as much: ‘Personal, tenurial, justiciarythreads are woven into a web that bewilders us.’⁴⁷ Some of those threads becamedisentangled in the central–later Middle Ages as kingdoms and states began toappropriate them to themselves. But for the most part ‘lordship’—including non-royal lordship (so consistently underrated by English medieval historians)—stilloperated across large swathes of the lives of those who lived—as individualsand communities—under its authority. ‘Medieval terminology’, so assertedOtto 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 thefifteenth 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.


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

ADDITIONAL BIBLIOGRAPHY

For secular lordship in the medieval West, S. Reynolds, ‘Secular Power andAuthority in the Middle Ages’, in Power and Authority in the Middle Ages: Essaysin 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: ConstructingAristocracy in England and France, 900–1300 (Harlow, 2005).

For lordship in late medieval France (and Burgundy), P. Contamine, La Noblesseau Royaume de France de Philippe le Bel a Louis XII. Essai de Synthese (Paris,1997). C. Allmand (ed.), War, Government and Power in Late Medieval France(Liverpool, 2000) contains relevant essays by K. Daly, ‘ ‘‘Centre’’, ‘‘Power’’ and‘‘Periphery’’ in Late Medieval France’, G. Small, ‘Centre and Periphery in LateMedieval France: Tournai, 1384–1477’, and G. Prosser, ‘ ‘‘Decayed Feudalism’’and ‘‘Royal Clienteles’’: Royal Office and Magnate Service in the FifteenthCentury’. In D. Potter (ed.), France in the Later Middle Ages (Oxford, 2002)see G. Small, ‘The Crown and the Provinces in the Fifteenth Century’ andG. Prosser, ‘The Later Medieval French Noblesse’.

For a British Isles perspective on lordship, P. Morgan, ‘Ranks of Society’, inThe Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries, ed. R. Griffiths (Oxford, 2003) andB. Smith, ‘Lordship in the British Isles c.1320–c.1360: The Ebb Tide of theEnglish Empire?’, in Power and Authority in the Middle Ages. Essays in Memory ofRees Davies, ed. H. Pryce and J. Watts (Oxford, 2007). For England, S. Walker,Political Culture in Later Medieval England (Manchester, 2006), especially theessays in part 1, ‘Lordship and Service’; C. Dyer, ‘The Ineffectiveness of Lordshipin England, 1200–1400’, in Rodney Hilton’s Middle Ages: An Exploration ofHistorical Themes, ed. C. Dyer, P. Coss, and C. Wickham. Past and PresentSupplement 2 (Oxford, 2007). For the exercise of lordship on the lands ofthe bishopric of Winchester, The Winchester Pipe Rolls and Medieval English

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

Apologia 19

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


1The Higher Aristocracy: Identity and Memory

The higher aristocracy is not an easily defined group. Peerage lawyers andgenealogists have expended a great deal of effort and ingenuity in attempting toformulate, and then to apply, such definitions; but the untidiness and fluidity ofhuman categorizations and the shifting character of status vocabulary more oftenthan not undermine the tidiness of such definitions. Nor, frankly, is this a matterof undue concern for the argument of this book, since its theme is to investigatethe character of lordship rather than to try to define the membership of the clubof higher aristocrats in a schematic and formulaic manner. Nevertheless it is aswell at the outset to have some broad notion of the dimensions of the group.

So let us start with some bald figures, none of which is to be regarded asmore than indicative. It is simplest to start with England. There had alwaysbeen in effect, if not institutionally, an elite group within the medieval nobilityin England. They might be defined—for those anxious to have definitions—ascorresponding to the 180 or so tenants-in-chief or, more plausibly, to thosegreater magnates who, according to the terms of Magna Carta in 1215, wereto receive an individual summons from the king when he wished to discussraising an aid as a tax. Their eminence would have been readily recognizedby contemporaries in terms of titles, wealth, status, political standing, size offollowing, and increasingly in the acceptance of the notion of ‘peers’. But themembership of this group was neither fixed nor static; it fluctuated, partly inresponse to the fortunes and misfortunes of families and partly according towhom the king decided to summon to his councils and parliaments. It wasduring the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries that the membership of thegroup came finally to be formally defined and its membership converted intoa hereditary, parliamentary peerage. This was a process which K. B. McFarlanefamously characterized as one of ‘exclusion, definition and stratification’.¹ Thechronology of this process has now been amply outlined in various historicalstudies; it need not be repeated here. It was part of a wider process of tighteningand refining the vocabulary and terminology of the status distinction of ‘gentle’society which is a feature of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. So it wasthat a clear and differentiated tariff of wages was established for military serviceto the king, or that sumptuary legislation laid down the clothes appropriate to

¹ McFarlane, Nobility, 269.


each legally defined social group, or that the legislation regulating the givingof liveries (from Richard II’s reign onwards) specifically exempted ‘dukes, earls,barons and bannerets’. These and similar developments indicated that a definedand quasi-hereditary elite had now ensconced itself legally and institutionallyat the apex of English society. This may serve as our working definition of thehigher aristocracy.

How large a group was it? We would not be far wrong were we to indicatethat by the early fifteenth century it included at most sixty families. Thesefamilies—or the senior representative of them—claimed a rank and privilegeswhich set them apart from the rest of gentle society, notably the virtuallyhereditary right to receive individual summonses to parliament. There was, ofcourse, much that was contingent and accidental in the composition of thegroup at any given point in time—as families failed (naturally or artificially)and as new members were promoted by royal favour. But the size of the groupremained broadly unchanging. Furthermore the income tax returns for 1436indicate that though this elite was not formally defined in terms of its income, itdid nevertheless stand out from the rest of landed society in terms of its wealth.²

Within this higher aristocracy—generally termed ‘barons’—there was afurther refinement. The creme de la creme of the group flaunted titles—normallyearl, but later also duke (from 1337) and marquis (from 1385, but rare)—whichfurther differentiated them and, in a society increasingly obsessed with theetiquette of precedence and ceremony, set them further apart. Their numbersvaried: they stood at ten in 1280, at seventeen in 1400.³ So did their wealth varywidely, but it had come to be accepted that a landed income of one thousandmarks (£666 13s. 4d.) per annum was a minimum territorial qualification for anearl. This comital–ducal group—the premier league of the higher aristocracy,as it were—is of particular interest to us since it is its documentary evidence(or such of it as survives) which underpins the analysis of lords and lordship inthis book.

When we turn to Scotland and English Ireland in search of a higher aristocracy,we find ourselves in even more difficulties, not least because of the inadequaciesof the surviving evidence. It is not surprising that in certain directions theevolution of the Scottish higher aristocracy seemed to echo developments inEngland. After all, the links between the English and Scottish royal courts inthe twelfth and thirteenth centuries were often close; and many of the premierScottish comital families were of Anglo-Norman stock (Bruce, Stewart, andComyn among them) and often continued to retain territorial and other interestsin England. Even as late as 1398 the Scots could borrow a leaf from recentEnglish practice by adopting the title of ‘duke’ for their greatest noblemen. But

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

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

The Higher Aristocracy: Identity and Memory 23

these similarities and imitations should not mislead us. There were substantialand substantive differences between late medieval England and Scotland both inthe chronology and in the terminology of their higher aristocracies. Thus theterms ‘barons’ and ‘free barony’ had very different connotations in Scotland fromthose of English usage, and no Scottish peerage can be said to have appeareduntil the fifteenth century. Likewise in terms of wealth and the nature of theirlordship, the differences between the higher Scottish aristocracy and their Englishcounterparts were often more striking than the similarities. These differences aremore than surface variations; they reflect profound differences in the characterand distribution of aristocratic (as indeed of royal) power as between Scotlandand England.⁴

None of this can be gainsaid; yet a higher aristocracy is clearly identifiable inScotland. It numbered about fifty; in other words it was considerably larger inrelation to the overall size of the population than was the English parliamentarypeerage. These were the men who really counted, the heavyweights, in Scottishpolitical society. Forty-eight of them were named in the declaration of Arbroath in1320; fifty-six did personal homage to King Robert II at his coronation in 1371.As in England, a group of earldoms stood at the head of this elite community.In the 1280s (as in 1329 at the end of Robert I’s reign) they numberedthirteen—five (Angus, Buchan, Carrick, Menteith, Sutherland) in the hands offamilies of continental origins but now fully Scotticized (Umfraville, Comyn,Bruce, Stewart, and the descendants of Freskin the Fleming); the remainingeight (Atholl, Dunbar, Caithness, Fife, Lennox, Mar, Ross, and Strathearn) heldby native families often, as at Strathearn, with all the powers and traditionsof Celtic mormaorship.⁵ In addition to earldoms, Scotland had a category ofaristocratic power-bases unknown to English terminology or historiography, the‘provincial lordships’. There were around twenty of them at the beginning ofour period.⁶ They were often as extensive territorially and jurisdictionally assome of the earldoms but lacked the title; they were broadly coextensive withthe historic provinces or regions of the kingdom. Between them the earldomsand the ‘provincial lordships’ covered close on two-thirds of the surface area ofmodern Scotland. This suggests that the configuration of power, specifically ofaristocratic lordship, was, or could be, very different from that familiar frommuch of the English evidence. It is a point to which we will need to return.

What of English Ireland? Viewed from one angle—that of the English govern-ment in Westminster and Dublin—English Ireland mimicked the institutions,practices, and laws of England to a remarkable degree. Aristocratic lordship inIreland therefore had to a considerable extent to operate within this framework.

⁴ See in general Duncan, Scotland ; A. Grant, Independence and Nationhood: Scotland 1306–1469(Edinburgh, 1984).

⁵ Grant, Independence and Nationhood, 122; G. W. S. Barrow, The Anglo-Norman Era in ScottishHistory (Oxford, 1980), 157–8.

⁶ McNeill and MacQueen (eds.), Atlas of Scottish History, 184–6, 206.


But such a statement is at best a half-truth. Aristocratic lordship in English Irelandwas bound to be different from that experienced in contemporary England forat least three reasons. First, English Ireland was a land of extensive aristocraticliberties where lordship could operate in all its amplitude. As Robin Framehas pointed out, ‘something over half the territorial extent of English Irelandwas . . . outside the area of shire ground.’ Secondly, much of Ireland was, in thecontemporary phrase, ‘a land of war’, not necessarily recurrently but sufficientlymenacingly to give a distinctly military flavour to any lordship which intendedto operate at all effectively there. Thirdly, and related to this, English-controlledIreland—itself a shifting and unstable category—was a collection of localizedand hybrid societies where the only effective lordship was one which workedwith the grain of local situations and practices. The world of the resident lords ofmost of English Ireland was a very far cry indeed from that of the great magnatesof midland and southern England.⁷

Can we hazard a guess as to the number of these English lords in Ireland whomwe might venture to designate as ‘higher aristocrats’? A figure of twenty/thirtywould probably err on the high side. A series of important royal commands tothe most important Anglo-Irish lords issued 1322–37 ranged in number fromthirteen in 1331 to twenty-eight in 1335; these seem to identify those who mightbe regarded as the leaders of the English community in Ireland.⁸ These figuresare paralleled by those for men known to have been summoned to the Irishparliament: twenty-seven in 1333, twenty-eight in 1378, but falling steadily to nomore than twelve at the end of the Middle Ages.⁹ The numbers, in other words,were modest as compared with those for England and Scotland; and no definedconception of peerage had yet been established. The numbers of Anglo-Irishearldoms (as opposed to English earldoms such as Gloucester, Norfolk, or laterMarch which held large estates in Ireland) was also very modest: only one (the deBurgh earldom of Ulster) in 1280 rising to four in 1380 (the Geraldine earldomsof Desmond and Kildare, the Butler earldom of Ormond, and the earldom ofUlster now in the hands of the Mortimer earls of March).

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

⁷ Frame, Ireland and Britain, passim. ⁸ Frame, English Lordship in Ireland, 16–18.⁹ H. G. Richardson and G. O. Sayles, The Irish Parliament in the Middle Ages (Philadelphia,

1952), 130–4.


(between, say, an immensely rich royal duke such as John of Gaunt, duke ofLancaster (d. 1399) and Fulk Fitzwarin (d. 1374) whose landed fortunes wererelatively modest and who served in the military retinue of Gaunt); nor is it indoubt that there was an overlap, in income and status, between some of thelesser parliamentary barons and some of the knights of the shire. Neverthelessthere is every reason to characterize this higher aristocracy as the ruling elitein England, Scotland, and English Ireland in our period, with the earldoms(normally twenty-five/thirty for all three areas) as a further top tier within thiselite. It is this group in particular which we will have within our historical sights.

The overall size and importance of the group did not alter radically withinour period, 1272–1422. But such apparent continuity and stability conceals therapid turnover in the composition of the group from one generation to the next.Political miscalculation and forfeiture have often been identified as the majorreason for such a turnover. Occasional bloodlettings (such as those of the reigns ofEdward II and Richard II in England) could certainly leave their mark; but whatis remarkable is the way that so many noble families, laid low in one generation,could recover their fortunes and standing in the next. Arundel, Despenser,Mortimer are instances which immediately spring to mind in England. It is inother directions in particular that we should look for the explanation for therapid turnover in the ranks of the higher aristocracy. The primary reasons, itis now acknowledged, were the failure of families in the direct male line andthe transfer of their estates and often their titles either to collaterals or, throughmarriage, to other families. McFarlane’s famous statistic that on average acrossthe two centuries 1300–1500 a quarter of noble families became extinct in thedirect male line (according to his definition of extinction) every twenty-five yearsis broadly confirmed by similar statistics for Scotland.¹⁰ Thus in England thefollowing comital families failed in the direct legitimate male line of the body(in chronological order) in the fourteenth century: Edmund of Cornwall 1300,Bigod 1306, Lacy 1311, Clare 1314, Valence 1324, Warenne 1347, Bohun1361, Lancaster 1361, Bohun (of Northampton) 1373, Ufford 1382, Hastings1389. Only two families—Vere and Beauchamp—lasted the century, with twoothers (Courtenay and Fitzalan) as runners-up.

Such a drastic and regular thinning out of the ranks of the nobility—aphenomenon which seems to have been common to ‘gentle’ (and no doubtpeasant) society generally and one of which contemporaries were all too painfullyand morbidly aware—had to be counterbalanced by regular recruitment of‘new’ men to take their place. Recruitment was generally a matter of service(military, political, diplomatic) and/or royal reward. So it was that Edward III,

¹⁰ McFarlane, Nobility, 146. For a critique and revised figures see the key contribution by S. J.Payling ‘Social Mobility, Demographic Change, and Landed Society in Late Medieval England’,Econ. HR, 45 (1992), 51–73. For Scottish figures see the articles by Alexander Grant cited above,p. 14.


in a spectacular act of generosity, rewarded six of the men who had helped himto overthrow Roger Mortimer and install his own regime by promoting themall to be earls on the same day in March 1337. David II of Scotland likewisesignalled his indebtedness and that of his father to the devotion and prowess ofthe Douglas family by conferring the new title of earl of Douglas on WilliamDouglas in 1358. Kings were not usually over-lavish in the bestowal of newcomital titles: the Scottish kings only created two entirely new earldoms (Douglasand Crawford) during the whole of the fourteenth century; in England onlytwenty-four new earldoms (including the six created by Edward III in 1337)were created outside the immediate royal family between 1307 and 1397. Thephrase ‘outside the immediate royal family’ is significant, since it identifies theother important source of recruitment of new individuals, and thereby families,into the ranks of the aristocracy. It was a pool of recruits where kings showedlittle restraint. All five of the surviving sons of Edward III were promoted tocomital and eventually ducal rank (or indeed to that of prince in the case ofEdward); and secured, often by royally provided and well-calculated marriages,a territorial endowment commensurate with their status. Even more remarkablewas what happened in Scotland where the profile of the higher aristocracy wastransformed and ‘stewartized’ during the second half of the fourteenth century.¹¹By 1377 seven out of sixteen Scottish earldoms were in the hands of the kingor 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 soinextricably intertwined in both countries.

The dominance of the higher aristocracy remained unchallenged throughoutour period; but its composition changed, occasionally dramatically, from gener-ation to generation, indeed decade to decade. Beyond this process of perpetualflux there are two other long-term changes within the ranks of this top nobilitywhich we should note at this juncture. The first was a tendency for comital titlesand estates to be aggregated into the hands of fewer major families generally as aconsequence (intended or not) of the marriage of heiresses. Thus Thomas earl ofLancaster (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 Humphreyde 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 heirof his unmarried uncle. Scotland could produce many similar instances thoughfew perhaps to match the clutch of one dukedom (Albany) and three earldoms(Atholl, Fife, and Menteith) which Robert Stewart (d. 1420) had cornered atdifferent stages in his life. These accumulations of title explain why the numberof earls is often considerably less than the number of earldoms; it also illustratesthe universal truth that to those who have much, more is often given.

¹¹ R. Nicholson, Scotland: The Later Middle Ages (Edinburgh, 1974), 187, 232.


The second long-term change has, perhaps, been less noticed and is of particularsignificance for the theme of this book. In 1272 it was not at all unusual forsome major comital families to own and exploit rich lordships in England, theMarch of Wales, and Ireland. Likewise a considerable number of major Scottishfamilies held estates and other appurtenances in England; the large east midlandsearldom of Huntingdon, centred on Fotheringay, held by members of theScottish royal family, was only the most outstanding example. The significanceof these pan-British connections in the ranks of the higher aristocracy is obvious.They were the basis of territorial, social, cultural, economic, and marital linksacross the face of the British Isles, at least in the lowlands. They encouraged thetransfer of personnel, institutions, and laws from one part of the British Islesto another, overwhelmingly from lowland England to the northern and westernoutliers. These bonds made for an increasing community of interests and habitswithin higher aristocratic society throughout the British Isles. Thus Gilbert deClare, earl of Gloucester (d. 1295) was one of the premier earls of England andson-in-law of Edward; but the sphere of his travels and interests also took him toGlamorgan in Wales and Kilkenny and Dublin in Ireland. Had these pan-Britishlinks and connections been fostered and developed it is not inconceivable that asingle British higher aristocracy might eventually have emerged.

But it was not to be. The door on such a prospect was in effect slammedshut in the late thirteenth–early fourteenth centuries, specifically between 1296and 1333. In the former year the onset of the Scottish Wars of Independenceinaugurated a prolonged period of bitter tension between England and Scotlandand with it the severance of any remaining bonds and connections between thetwo 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 profoundlyit manifested and confirmed the growing gulf between the ‘resident lords’ (asthey have been called) of Ireland (notably the earls of Desmond, Kildare,and Ormond) and their absentee England-based colleagues. The bonds whichhad tied the aristocratic communities of England and English Ireland becameincreasingly 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 underthe Normans (1911–20) in 1333. Orpen may have been unduly optimistic inhis view of the pax Normanica which English rule and settlement had broughtto Ireland; but he was surely correct to suggest that after 1333 English Irelandwas no longer normally part of the mental map, physical circuit, and politicalambitions of the higher aristocracy of England. The aristocracies of England andEnglish Ireland would henceforth largely go their own ways. There was to be nosingle British Isles aristocracy.

The only part of the British Isles beyond England which remained firmlypart 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 ofaristocratic lordship in the British Isles in our period. At any given point in the


thirteenth or fourteenth centuries a good proportion of English earls held one ormore Marcher lordships in Wales (five out of ten in 1280; nine out of seventeenin 1380). There they exercised more ample and unfettered powers of lordshipthan anywhere else in Britain (including Ireland). It is therefore a particularlysignificant region for the study of the character and potential of aristocraticpower. But there was no Marcher higher aristocracy as such. Rather was there anEnglish aristocracy which exercised lordship, very ample lordship, in the Marchof 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, andEnglish Ireland. From one angle it was, as we have seen, a group in constantflux as families failed, or were extinguished, in the male line and new memberswere recruited through the twin routes of service and royal favour. Such a rapidturnover notwithstanding, one of the obsessive concerns of the group centredon its identity and continuity through time. Heritage and inheritance were keyconcepts in its vocabulary; so was concern about the honour of the family andan emphasis on the depth and continuity of the family ‘name’. These were thewarrantors of the antiquity and status of the family: they must be upheld anddefended at all costs.

The issue was particularly vexatious for families which faced the prospectof extinction in the direct, legitimate male line. No one spent more sleeplessnights over many years worrying about the problem than John de Warenne, earlof Surrey (d. 1347). He was one of the few leading magnates of his day whocould genuinely show that he was descended from one of the companions of theConqueror. The antiquity and continuity of his family was beyond reproach. Itderived its name from Varenne near Dieppe; it had held its earldom (alternativelytermed Warenne or Surrey) since 1088; John himself was the eighth descendantof the family to carry the title. John’s career as earl (1306–47) was remarkablylong; 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 afamily disaster. He was estranged from his wife, Joan of Bar (granddaughter ofEdward I) at an early date; but lacked the political clout to secure a divorceand the right to remarry. He had mistresses aplenty and fathered children bythem. But he lacked a legitimate heir of his body and there can be no doubt thathis 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 tohis (Richard’s) disadvantage. But Earl John even in old age had not abandonedall 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’. Soin his sixtieth year he struck a desperate bargain with Edward III and one whichmust have appealed almost as much to the king as to the earl. Should the old earlbeget an heir by his wife, Isabel Holland—she was in fact his mistress but the


earl still fondly believed that he might secure a divorce, in spite of his repeatedfailures on that quest in the past—then this heir should marry a member of theroyal family (John of Gaunt or Edmund of Langley, young as they were, werepossibilities on the male side), taking with him/her the Warenne lands (or such asremained) and, crucially, ‘the name and arms of Warenne’. Should the ultimatecatastrophe occur—namely that the earl should die without a legitimate heir ofhis 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 grantedto one of the king’s sons and his heirs provided ‘the name, honour and arms ofWarenne’ were retained. Many considerations no doubt pressed in on the earlas he made this desperate offer—making an honest woman of his long-timemistress and securing a royal match for his offspring (a temptation which hasenticed the aristocracy down the centuries). But overriding these considerationswas an anxiety which his fellow magnates (most of whom seem to have had alow view of the earl of Surrey) shared and appreciated—that of perpetuatingthe name and arms of the ancient family. This was a deep-seated instinct in allfamilies.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 (agedtwenty-five) without an heir of his body and was about to set out on what indeedproved to be a militarily hazardous expedition. He clearly discussed his planswith Edward III, and, though the king was ageing, he struck a shrewd bargainwith the earl, as he had done with the earl of Surrey in 1346. As the priceof sanctioning the arrangements which Hastings made, Edward III secured thereversion of the county of Pembroke and the lordships of Tenby, Cilgerran, andYstlwyf—in other words a very substantial slice of south-west Wales—in theevent of the failure of the male Hastings line. If Hastings died without issue, allhis other lands were to be offered to his cousin, Sir William Beauchamp (the sonof Hastings’s maternal aunt), on condition that ‘he shall bear the whole arms ofthe said earl’ and that he should do his best to persuade the king to allow himand his heirs to carry the title of ‘earl of Pembroke’. Should Beauchamp declinethese conditions then the lands were to revert to another of Hastings’s friendswho was not even a kinsman, Sir William Clinton. In other words Hastings waswilling 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 familyambition—to protect the integrity of the family’s coat of arms and, if at allpossible, its comital title.¹³

Dying without surviving male heir of the body was the nightmare whichhaunted gentle society generally. That is most graphically illustrated in the

¹² The biography in E. R. Fairbank, ‘The Last Earl of Warenne and Surrey’, YorkshireArchaeological Journal, 19 (1907), 193–266, is still serviceable.

¹³ R. I. Jack, ‘Entail and Descent: The Hastings Inheritance’, BIHR, 38 (1965), 1–19.


window (no longer extant) which Sir Thomas Erpingham had constructed in thechurch 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 thecounties of Norfolk and Suffolk since the coronation of the noble Edward theThird’. His tally ran to eighty-seven families.¹⁴ Taking out an insurance policyagainst 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 along and distinguished career: a fine and profitable record in the wars in Francesince 1356; two marriages into two of England’s comital families; and regularindividual summonses to parliament 1357–89. But heirs of his body he hadnone. So in his will he transferred his lands successively to four men in tailmale with the proviso in each case that each of them should carry the surnameof Basset and his arms.¹⁵ The family and its arms were to survive regardless ofthe failure of direct male heirs of the body. Nor was this a peculiarly Englishphenomenon. When the powerful James Douglas, lord of Dalkeith, married hissecond 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 husbandwould be bound to ‘accept and enjoy the surname of Douglas’ and the arms ofJames Douglas.¹⁶

Many families were willing to pay such a price. The example of one baronialfamily will serve. Already in 1323, on the death of his own son and heir, RobertFitz 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 yearsor so. When he eventually died in 1354 the reversionary interest which he hadagreed in 1323 came into effect. His inheritance in Somerset and Dorset wasacquired by his nephew, Robert son of Richard Grey of Codnor and of JoanFitz Pain. Robert Grey promptly changed his name to Robert Fitz Pain, therebypublicly acknowledging the source of his good fortune in his new surname. Hewas certainly not unique in this respect. It was a good bargain: he had secured aninheritance and his uncle could rest assured that the family name had survivedafter all.¹⁷ Individual cases such as those of Warenne, Hastings, Basset, and FitzPain do not necessarily constitute a general rule; but they do lay bare the anxietiesof magnate families and the devices they adopted to deal with them. The solutionadopted 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 andtheir heirs in tail male. Succession in tail male—a legal device to which we willreturn later—had many aspects to it; but primary among them was an anxietyto keep the family inheritance intact and with it the family name, honour, andarms in the male line. It sought to perpetuate the family’s status and continuitythrough time.

¹⁴ McFarlane, Nobility, 145–6. ¹⁵ GEC sub nomine; CIPM, XXI, no. 63.¹⁶ Mort. Reg., II, nos. 184, 196. ¹⁷ GEC sub nomine; CIPM, X, nos. 175, 292.


This sense of identity through time was likewise manifested in visual and tactileways. Family mementoes and heirlooms were physical examples of the depth offamily memory. Two examples from the annals of the Mortimer family spring tomind. Among the effects of Roger Mortimer at his execution in 1330 was ‘onebrass horn which, with a certain falchion (a broad curved sword with a convexedge) which is, it is said, the charter of the land of Wigmore’.¹⁸ Roger had onlyvery recently been created earl of March; but his family could indeed claim thatit 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 inhis will, along with another family heirloom, ‘our sword decorated with goldwhich 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 suchheirlooms were necessarily title deeds to property or status, but they often wereredolent 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 mailbelonging 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 betransferred thereafter from heir to heir, lords of Arundel.²¹

Nothing affirmed gentle society’s identity and lineage more publicly than theheraldic 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 periodin the making of the English heraldic tradition and in establishing heraldic coatsof arms as the signifier par excellence of noble identity and lineage.²² The youngnobleman was now expected to be able to read and distinguish between variousheraldic representations. It was, along with the technical jargon of hunting,what John of Salisbury had very appropriately termed ‘the scholarship of thearistocracy’. Nothing demarcates an elite more clearly than its mastery of a privatetechnical vocabulary. Soon Rolls of Arms, the gazetteers of the new fashionablecult of heraldry, were in preparation: the earliest surviving English example datesfrom the mid thirteenth century; at least eighteen are still extant from the reignof Edward I. Heralds, the high priests of heraldic lore, came into their own,especially at tournaments and other high feasts of the aristocratic and chivalricyear. By the fourteenth century all the leading aristocratic families had their ownhighly 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 Cossand Maurice Keen (Woodbridge, 2003) and Keen, Origins of the English Gentleman.

²³ Mortimer herald: CPR 1381–5, 156; BL Egerton Charters 8734.


John of Gaunt regularly gave gifts to his own and to visiting heralds, especiallywhen they attended the jousts arranged by him.²⁴

Armorial bearings became increasingly elaborate as the fourteenth centuryprogressed. In particular the practice of quartering provided an opportunity fordisplaying alliances by marriage and dependence. Heraldic emblems were nowthe visual means which declared immediately and proudly to the world thestatus, identity, interrelatedness, and antiquity of noble families. They swampedaristocratic England in a rash of heraldic blazons—not only on shields and sealsbut 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 andprofusely paraded the hereditary badges of its identity. So it was, to quote a fewexamples, that the countess of Pembroke commissioned two tapestries adornedwith 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 lionswith escutcheons of the arms of Mortimer and Ulster’ (his paternal and maternalforbears); or that the earl of Norfolk in 1415 commissioned the Mowbray armsto be painted on the seven windows of the hall of his London house and thehatchment of his arms to be added to those of other lords of England in the hallof the bishop of Durham.²⁵ In Scotland in a similar fashion the house of Douglascelebrated its remarkable rise to pre-eminence in aristocratic society by makinggreat play of the role of its effective founder, Sir James Douglas, who had died oncrusade in Spain carrying King Robert I’s heart. ‘The Bludy Heart’ was now theproud identifying badge of the family. It was flaunted on their standard in battle,stamped on their wooden bowls, and carved on their buildings and religiousfoundations.²⁶ Such arms and emblems declared the family’s identity and upheldits honour. To challenge the authenticity and the exclusivity of a family’s coatof 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 thefamous and bitter Scrope–Grosvenor dispute of the 1380s is the classic andbest-documented instance.

Alongside heraldic devices we should mention badges and collars, whichbecame an increasingly common means of expressing aristocratic (and royal)associations of service and lordship from the mid fourteenth century. Thesignificance 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 heraldicknot 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 citedabove 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 Douglasand the Presentation of Magnate Power in Late Medieval Scotland’, SHR, 76 (1997), 161–84.


the opportunities for an aristocratic family to display the extent of its circle ofpower and affinity. The distribution of livery (often in the family’s colours) wasyet another way in which the aristocracy could manifest visually its capacityto command dependence, particularly from members of gentle society. It waspart of the semiotics of aristocratic power and a vivid display of the depth ofdependence and support it could command. Even the earl of Devon, one of thelesser English earls, listed at least 130 persons—ranging from seven knights tofour minstrels and six pages—who were in receipt of his livery in 1384–5.²⁷So aristocratic lordship displayed itself and its solidarity in the person anddress of its dependants. Paradoxically, the outcry against badges and liveries inthe later fourteenth century only served to emphasize that such a display ofpower and dependence was perfectly acceptable among the higher aristocracy(defined in the statute of 1390 as dukes, earls, barons, and bannerets) butprohibited to those (knights and others) below this rank. This was a furtheracknowledgement—alongside the definition of a quasi-hereditary parliamentarypeerage in England—that the higher aristocracy stood clearly apart from, andabove, the rest of ‘gentle’ society. A great lord must have his ‘worship’; distributinghis 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 aswell as of sentiment and piety. The past, after all, was the validating charter of itsidentity and power. It could well be a legendary past; but in a society besottedwith Arthurian tales, classical romances, and feudal epics that was no deterrent.The Beauchamp family provides an instructive example. It milked the storiesabout its legendary founder—Earl Guy of Warwick, the man who was claimed tohave saved England from the Danes—to maximum effect.²⁸ His image slaying adragon was vividly represented on the famous Beauchamp mazer; a tower namedafter him was constructed in Warwick castle in 1394; and a tapestry illustratingthe legend was hung in the castle itself.²⁹ The Beauchamps were singularlyfortunate in the fifteenth century in that they were able to supplement thelegends of the mythical Earl Guy by the prowess of a contemporary earl, the greatEarl Richard of Warwick (d. 1439). His cult was as vigorously promoted as thatof his predecessor—be it in his magnificent effigy (the most striking survivingmonument to an English earl) in the Beauchamp chapel in the collegiate churchat Warwick, or in the pictorial biography of his ‘noble actes’ in the fifty-threepen-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 LateMedieval Aristocratic Affinity’, Southern History, 1 (1979), 71–97.

²⁸ E. Mason, ‘Legends of the Beauchamps’ Ancestors: The Use of Baronial Propaganda inMedieval 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 Architectureof the Earls of Warwick in the Fourteenth Century’, in England in the Fourteenth Century, ed.W. M. Ormrod (Woodbridge, 1986), 161–74.


roll-chronicles (one in Latin, the other in English) which John Rous preparedto recount the history and the achievements of the family from its legendarybeginnings onwards.³⁰

John Rous was a chantry priest. That helps to identify a group or institutionwhich had a vested interest in cultivating and perpetuating the historical memoryof noble families—the churches and monasteries which had been endowedby them. Their own standing and endowment were grounded in past noblebenefactions and their prospects for the future were likewise tied to the generosityof the same families or their descendants. So it was that they cultivated the historyof those families in their annals, histories, and cartularies. Tewkesbury abbeywas even more innovative. In the 1340s it commissioned representations of thearistocratic patrons of the abbey to be placed in the two westernmost windowsof the choir clerestory. Starting with Robert Fitzhamon (d. 1107) they outlinedthe 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, andno doubt pleasing to abbey and lord alike. Within churches and monasteries,the continuity of noble families through time was further demonstrated in theserried ranks of family tombs such as the magnificent series of Fitzalan tombsat Arundel. Even more impressive—though they have not survived—were theMortimer tombs at Wigmore abbey. Hugh Mortimer (d. 1185) had foundedthe abbey in 1179 and clearly intended it to be a family mausoleum. He was notto be disappointed in that respect. Every head of the Mortimer family thereafteruntil 1398 was laid to rest in the abbey and so were several other members ofthe family.

We know the details of the Mortimer burials because they are carefully recordedin what is perhaps the most remarkable fourteenth-century aristocratic chronicle,the account of the Mortimer family from the Norman conquest embedded inthe Wigmore abbey chronicle. The chronicle (University of Chicago MS. 224)is a composite volume and has not yet received the detailed analysis it deserves.³²Its provenance is immediately revealed in its opening Anglo-Norman accountof the early, tumultuous years of Wigmore abbey. But its focus was far frombeing 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 inJ. Dickinson and P. T. Ricketts, ‘The Anglo-Norman Chronicle of Wigmore Abbey’, Transactionsof the Woolhope Field Club, 39 (1969), 413–46. The Brut section of the chronicle has never beenpublished. 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 thechronicle and its genealogies.


based on the Brut chronicle, but also displaying an unusual knowledge of, andinterest in, the borderlands and dynasties of central Wales, the focus of somuch of the military prowess and territorial claims of the Mortimer family.But what is of particular interest for the current argument are the twelvefolios devoted to the history of the Mortimers. This takes the form of heraldicgenealogy of the family displayed in the arms of the head of the family andthose of each of their wives. The genealogy is accompanied by a historicalnarrative concentrating on the prowess of members of the family, their maritalalliances, their benefactions to the abbey and a remarkably fulsome and detailedcharacterization of Earl Edmund (d. 1381) and his son Earl Roger (d. 1398).In spite of some inaccuracies and confusions, the account is impressive bothin its attempt to construct a coherent history of the family and, above all, inits glimpses of detailed local knowledge—such as the precise account of thelanded endowment which Earl Roger (d. 1330) gave to his daughter Matildaon 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 afortified bridge across the river Bann at Coleraine in the Mortimer lordshipof Ulster.

The Mortimer chronicle was almost certainly written in the late fourteenthcentury, though with periodic additions (including an account of the battle ofShrewsbury, 1403) thereafter. A reference to Earl Roger (d. 1398) as dominusmeus suggests as much; so does the intimate knowledge of his career and thatof his father. Family continuity through time was its theme; but it had also amore ambitious, even sinister agenda—to proclaim the genealogical pretensionsof the Mortimer family to be descended from the royal dynasties of Englandand Wales and even to locate such pretensions in the fantasy world of the Brutlegend. It is easy to appreciate how such notions could have been nourished inthe family’s monastery at Wigmore and among the Mortimer clerical adherents.Adam Usk—born in a Mortimer lordship, educated at the expense of EarlEdmund, a man steeped in Welsh genealogical lore and prophecy and a characterof floating political loyalties—is a possible candidate.³³ Be that as it may, whatthe Mortimer chronicle shows—especially when placed side by side with themagnificent Mortimer cartulary of the same period³⁴—is how assiduously noblefamilies, and their clerical and monastic supporters, cultivated their histories. Itwas an affirmation of the antiquity and continuity of their status. The Mortimerfamily 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 hadcome to enjoy in fifteenth-century Scotland, it steered clear of a prosaic Latinchronicle. Instead the Buke of the Howlat (the book of the owl) was a long poeticallegory; 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.


family in the form of a celebration of its prowess, its status, its heraldic arms, itsloyalty to the crown, and its title to its lands.³⁵

Genealogies, chronicles, and allegorical poems served to express and confirmthe depth of the aristocracy’s historical memory; archives and muniments werethe records of its title to land and wealth and of its exploitative managementof that wealth. Surviving aristocratic records are disappointing and misleadingin this respect. They only represent a minute tithe of what once existed. Manyof them survive only as the result of political accident—be it the forfeiture ofa family (which, for example, brought huge caches of documents and lists ofarchives from the houses of Lancaster and Mortimer into the exchequer in1322) or its accession to the throne (as happened to the house of Lancaster in1398). Aristocratic houses doubtless kept copies of their title deeds to lands andfranchises from the twelfth century; but it was from about the mid thirteenthcentury that their record-keeping activities began to become more systematic.³⁶It is from about that period that evidence begins to survive of annual householdand financial accounts (both central and manorial), court rolls and, later,auditorial reports and valors. By the fourteenth century major figures such asthe Black Prince and John of Gaunt were keeping registers of all their officialcorrespondence, as the English chancery had done since 1200.³⁷ There is noreason to believe that they were unique in this respect.

Some of the records so produced might only be kept for a few years, forpurposes of audit and cross-referencing. Some were stored locally; others weresent to a central treasury, either automatically or on request. Thus in 1372 acommand 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 bedeposited in the treasury at the Savoy (where they were to be destroyed duringthe Great Revolt of 1381).³⁸ But equally, much more local records could becalled in for scrutiny: thus in 1384 the court rolls of the Mortimer lordshipof Radnor were to be taken to the treasury (in effect the muniment room) atLudlow.³⁹

Much of this record-depositing was no doubt part of the routine process of theaudit and interrogation of officials, local and central. Thus when the munimentsof Roger Mortimer of Wigmore (among other Contrariants) were deposited inthe Tower of London in 1322 they included ‘in an old pouch of canvas, therolls of the bailiffs and reeves of Roger for various manors, rolls of householdexpense of said Roger, and divers letters sent to Roger and members of hishousehold . . . 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 theDuchy 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).


Usk and other manors in the parts of Wales’.⁴⁰ All these were dismissed by theroyal clerks as ‘of no value’ (qui non sunt alicuius valoris). The problems of recordmanagement and selective archive retention were already vexing issues.

Nevertheless there can be no doubt that for aristocratic families the safecustody and arrangement of their muniments were a high priority. These were,after all, literally and metaphorically the title-deeds for their wealth and therebyfor their status and standing. So it was, for example, that the Black Prince putin an order for a ‘great chest fastened with three locks and keys for the rolls ofthe Prince, to be kept in the treasury which was in turn to be locked with threelocks’.⁴¹ Likewise the earl of Warwick bought thirty-six chests at Worcester in1402 in which ‘to deposit the muniments and charters’ for the earl. Later in thefifteenth century the dukes of Buckingham were to construct a specially builtmuniment room at Thornbury castle, where estate accounts and papers were tobe deposed in padlocked iron-bound chests.⁴²

The most valuable documents kept in these chests were the title-deeds toproperty. These were not items of antiquarian interest; they were cardinaldocuments in upholding title to property. So it was, for example, that the earlof Warwick in 1397 ordered muniments relating to the manor of Berkeleyto be brought from Warwick to London, no doubt to help the case whichhis legal advisers were mounting.⁴³ Such archives were carefully arranged forquick reference and often had considerable chronological depth to them. Thusthe Lancaster archives seized at Pontefract in 1322 contained not only recentLancaster material but also collections relating to the families of Montfort,Ferrers, and Lacy (earls of Leicester, Derby, and Lincoln respectively) whichhad now been subsumed in the Lancaster empire. Even more revealing of thedegree to which archival organization had developed in baronial estates are thecareful lists prepared of the Mortimer muniments in 1322.⁴⁴ The munimentswere systematically arranged in chests, coffers, pouches of canvas, and bags ofwhite hide, each identified by a reference letter—for instance in quodam coffinoligneo ad hanc litteram Q. They were arranged partly chronologically—startingwith documents dating to the period of Ralph Mortimer (d. 1246)—and partlyaccording to subject matter—recognizances, loans, and the like. This was clearlya ‘working’ archive; it was the documentary underpinning of the power andpretensions of one of the fast-rising baronial (soon to be comital) families of latermedieval England.

The coping-stone on the Mortimer family’s cultivation of its archival, andthereby its institutional, identity across time was the compilation of a cartulary. Itwas not, of course, alone in this. Every major church and monastery, every majoraristocratic 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.


number Beauchamp, Courtenay, Percy, Stafford, and Vere and of course themagnificent 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 ofDalkeith 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 Mortimerarchives which lay behind the enrolments of the deeds in the cartulary. It was across-referencing system of which no modern cataloguer would be ashamed. Therationale of the calendar of the cartulary was as follows:

1. Each manor or lordship was itemized alphabetically. Forty-four such units areitemized.

2. This was followed by the title of the muniment chest in which the deed ordeeds 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 inthe 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 theoriginal 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 folioof the cartulary the copies of deeds relating to contiguous or associatedmanors are to be found, e.g. Bridgwater, Odcombe, and Milverton (all inSomerset)—folio xvj.

The Mortimer cartulary (and its calendar) was assembled in the late fourteenthcentury, quite probably under the direction of the consortium (whose executivehead was Sir Thomas Mortimer) which took over the running of the Mortimerestates during the prolonged minority which followed the premature death ofEarl Edmund in 1381. From the point of view of our argument the significance ofthe cartulary—compiled during a minority, one of the most vulnerable periodsin 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 writtendeclaration of those foundations and thereby of the family’s institutional memoryin time. And so were all cartularies.

Cartularies, family chronicles and legends, genealogies, heraldic devices, funer-ary monuments were all part of the paraphernalia of a family’s cult of its continuitythrough time. They were essential elements in the exercise of self-validation andself-promotion in a world in which the authority of the past was the charter forpresent status. This was also a highly visual world in which the icons of power


were regularly on public display. There was nothing that was specifically andexclusively aristocratic (in the narrow sense of the word) about these monumentsof memories. After all, coats of arms, genealogies, and funerary monuments werelikewise part of the world of knights and esquires, while the use of seals as thesignifier of identity and authenticity had now extended to the lower orders ofsociety. But in the landscape and hierarchy of power in the late medieval BritishIsles, no one could be in any doubt that the greater magnates stood out inwealth and status. Their buildings, their parks, their retinues of servants, theirarmies, their sports, their dress, the ‘reverence’ and the ‘worship’ which theycommanded—all of them proclaimed that, alongside kings—and indeed as theircompanions—the great magnates were the elite.

We have described this elite so far in group terms, even if we have had toacknowledge that its composition changed from generation to generation. Sucha collective approach is well justified by the fact that its members did indeedsee themselves as a distinct and, to a considerable degree, exclusive group. Itis true that they shared many of their concerns and priorities—about issuessuch as the descent of estates, provision for daughters and younger children, afascination 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 naturalgovernors 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 apartfrom the rest of ‘gentle’ society, in wealth, status, and in self-perception as in theperception of others. They had, particularly in England, begun to call themselves‘peers’, to claim certain jurisdictional and other privileges, and to meet apart atnational assemblies. Their group identity and group consciousness was strong.

But ultimately the quality of a group is considerably determined by thecharacter and individuality of the members who compose it. The great aristocracyhas suffered in this respect, especially as compared with kings. We are conscious,of course, that kingship can be described in institutional and general terms. Wealso recognize that the behaviour and policies of kings are shaped and constrainedby the conventions, practices, and habits of the office they hold. But we arealso intensely aware that the personality, character, and policies of a king canshape and even transform the fortunes and reputation of a reign. Thus, whateverthe mould of common problems, powers, and constraints within which theyoperated, no one would confuse Edward I with his son Edward II or underrate thedegree to which their very different personalities set the tone of their respectivereigns. But we rarely extend these considerations of individuality to the greateraristocracy, other than in composing individual biographies of them. It is, ofcourse, in part a problem (as so often with the higher aristocracy) of manageabilityand sources. How can one present the characters of two-to-three dozen majoraristocrats, especially when contemporary insights into their personalities are sogenerally wanting? With that limitation we must learn to live; but at least we


need to be aware of the danger of packaging their personalities and behaviourunder a blanket of bland generalizations about the aristocracy.⁴⁵

In the first place we must recognize that a great, or indeed not so great, earlcould play a crucially directive role in shaping the character of his lordship. He (orsometimes she) was the lord; his was often the first and last word in the makingand enforcing of decisions about his lordship. So it was also with kingship. Inthe case of both kingship and lordship, the surviving historical sources may,paradoxically, serve us ill in this respect. They are primarily the documents ofbureaucracy, control, and accountability. They convey the priorities and habitsof the world of officialdom and are a remarkably impressive record of howwell and systematically lords (like kings) were served by their officers. But theyrarely take us to the heart of decision-making and even less so to the intenselypersonal world in which lords, like kings, operated. They are to that extentdepersonalized. Secondly, in so far as the careers of great aristocrats impingeon contemporary narrative sources, it is their public activities—their militaryexploits, their diplomatic forays, or their political ambitions—which catch theeye, and which can also be documented from the superb royal archives. Publiccareers 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 andfavour (and sometimes misfortune). None of this is to be gainsaid; but not at theexpense of overlooking the intense personal interest that most great lords took inthe 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. Paradoxicallynowhere is this better displayed than in the correspondence of the greatest of theEnglish lords of the period, Edward, earl of Chester, duke of Cornwall and princeof Wales (from 1343) and of Aquitaine (from 1362). The surviving corpus of hisletters 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, theflower of chivalry and largesse; but he was also consumed by meticulous oversightof the most minute affairs of his lordships in England and Wales. Decisions wereregularly 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 himand he kept a copy of them to hand ‘to refresh his memory’ and warned that nojudgment should be delivered ‘without consulting’ him. His officials lived in fearof his hawk eye and severe reprimand: he ‘marvelled’ at their decision and theywere 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 originallycomposed) ODNB.

⁴⁶ Reg. BP, II, 37, 46, 47, 49, 50, 61, 65 etc.; III, 10, 20, 98, 113, etc.


The Prince may have been an unusually brusque and hard taskmaster; but thereis no reason to believe that his degree of direction, scrutiny, and interventionwas unusual among the higher aristocracy. Another busy warrior, Earl RichardBeauchamp of Warwick (d. 1439), was kept in regular touch with the affairsof his lordship when he was on campaign in France and could issue orders tobe carried out ‘by the lord’s command’, just as Sir Peter de la Mare was givenoral instructions by his lord, the earl of March.⁴⁷ Court roll evidence makesit clear that proclamation might be made in court by the lord, pardons issuedby him ‘in propria persona’,⁴⁸ petitions thrust into his hand ‘as he walked inthe cloisters between the chamber and the hall after breakfast’;⁴⁹ warrants weredrafted at his personal authorization; and decisions regularly deferred until he hadbeen consulted.⁵⁰ Most intimidating of all would have been the lord’s personalpresence at the annual audit of the accounts of officials. Doubtless in many casesthe business was left to the lord’s auditors and members of his council. Butthe lord’s physical presence was certainly not unknown. Isabella de Fortibus isknown 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 madeby 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 rollof arrears, one specifically for ‘the personal scrutiny of the lady herself ’ (deversma dame pur sa conusance demesne).⁵¹

These examples are no doubt no more than the tips of an iceberg of seigniorialintervention. The lord’s will—be it his benevolence or his spleen—was acardinal factor in shaping policy. The reputation of lords was a matter of publicknowledge, 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 hissurviving correspondence; ‘the Welshmen hated the rule of Hugh’ was the tartcomment of a well-informed contemporary chronicler on him.⁵² The reputationof the Grey lords of Dyffryn Clwyd (north Wales)/Ruthin was not muchbetter. When the Grey lands were temporarily taken into royal custody in1322–3, the men of Dyffryn Clwyd were so anxious to avoid the prospectof 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 ofBritish 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; HouseholdAccounts, I, 47.

⁵² The phrase is that of the Lanercost chronicle quoted in Davies, Lordship and Society, 279. Forthe exceptionally revealing correspondence see ibid., 280 n. 17.


marks to be rid of it.⁵³ The reputation of a lord for hard-nosed niggardlinessand extortion could live in popular memory for generations: so it was that thememory of the pious Humphrey earl of Hereford (d. 1361) in Brecon was as ‘across, peevish Old Batchelor’ and ‘a most miserable Covetous grinding man’.⁵⁴Powerful ladies could also leave behind them a fearsome reputation; none moreso that Joan Beauchamp, lady of Abergavenny (d. 1435). She survived herhusband, Sir William Beauchamp (d. 1411), a cadet member of the Warwickearls, by twenty-four years and ruled her estates with a rod of iron. She wasafter all a daughter of the Fitzalan family, the most successfully entrepreneurialcomital family of fourteenth-century England. Hard-headed and hard-heartedbusinesswoman she might have been,⁵⁵ but the reputation that she left wasan unpleasantly fearsome one. Adam Usk might have had his own personalreasons for describing her, memorably, as ‘a second Jezebel’; but others sharedhis view. The collector of taxes in Worcestershire claimed, no doubt with someexaggeration, that because of the ill will in which she held him, he dared notcollect 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, earlof Norfolk, remitted ‘all his rancour and indignation’ against one of his officialswe catch a glimpse of how the lord’s emotions⁵⁷—like the ira and malevolentiaof Angevin kingship—were key elements in the exercise of power. We can hearit 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 withlordship wilful power could easily destroy itself. That is why Bruce McFarlanerightly identified ‘affability, however rough’ as a crucial quality of good andeffective lordship.⁵⁹ It could operate in a variety of ways: indulging the self-importance of local power-brokers, showing the largesse which was at the heartof good lordship, working with the grain of local society and its anxieties, andmaking timely grants and concessions to local communities. In that sense again,the acts of lordship largely replicated the acts of kingship. Two examples fromthe March of Wales may serve to illustrate sensitive lordship at work. In themid 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 andthat 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.


very strained, the king deliberately set out to try to destabilize the power andsupport of Humphrey de Bohun, earl of Hereford (d. 1299) in his great lordshipof Brecon. But the king was outwitted by the earl who summoned the menof Brecon before his officials, confirmed their laws and usages, made furtherconcessions on forest rights, and used local Welshmen to curry support. Theearl won this propaganda battle hands down: as the royal official was forced toacknowledge, ‘they were all at one with their lord.’⁶⁰ This was good lordship atwork. And it was at work from one generation to the next, as the men of Breconstood solidly behind the Bohun earls in the various political crises of the nextdecades. Just as Earl Humphrey displayed his skill in the arts of good lordshipin 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 successfullycultivated his support and ties with the men of his extensive estates in Walesand the March—employing them in his service, enlisting them in his armies,and dispensing ecclesiastical and academic patronage to them. When he wassummoned by the deeply suspicious Richard II to appear before the Shrewsburyparliament in January 1398, he was rapturously received by his followers andaccompanied by a retinue wearing hoods in his colours of red and green.⁶¹ Thecircumstances were, it is true, unusual; but lordship worked through charisma,display, and reward as well as through bluster and hard-nosed audit. In short, itwas at one level intensely personal and intensely individual.

Given that lordship was personal and that the character of the problemsand opportunities which faced it varied so widely, we might better grasp theindividuality of lord and lordship by brief thumbnail sketches of three of thesegreat lords. They are not among the best-known magnates of the period, thoughtheir role is well acknowledged within the historiography of their respectivecountries. What interests us about them is less the details of their biographies(those are amply chronicled in The Complete Peerage and in the Oxford Dictionaryof National Biography) than the light they may cast on the varying nature andvery different challenges of lordship in different parts of the British Isles in thefourteenth 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, throughits own prowess and royal support, found fortune and fame in Ireland in thethirteenth century. He was the second of the family to enjoy the title ‘earl ofUlster’, the only comital title in English Ireland in the late thirteenth century. Inmany respects Earl Richard would have been at home in the circle of his fellowearls 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).


referred to affectionately as ‘the king’s groom’ and served in person by the king’sside in the 1280s and 1290s. He enjoyed the cult of chivalry, holding great feastsand conferring the belt of knighthood. He played his part in English politicsat least occasionally, including standing as one of the guarantors of the treatyof Leake in 1318. His marriage alliances for his six daughters established linkswith 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 inMunster he exercised an economic and manorial lordship very similar to that ofthe generality of English magnates. Like them, he was a great castle builder andlike them he was expected to make, and normally did make, a major contributionto the armies of Edward I in Wales, Gascony, and Scotland.

In short, Earl Richard could have hobnobbed comfortably with Earl Thomasof Lancaster (d. 1322) or Earl Guy of Warwick (d. 1315). But there weredimensions to his career and to his lordship which set him and his like clearlyapart from them. He belonged also to the world of Ireland in general and ofEnglish Ireland in particular. By the second half of his career about half of Irelandlay, formally at least, under his rule. His lordship in much of it was very differentfrom that familiar in most of England (with the possible exception of the farnorth). He parleyed with Irish chieftains; deposed Irish kings; collected hugetributes in cattle from Irish lineages; went regularly on punitive raids, pillagingand taking hostages. This was a world of war and raids; he who exercised lordshiphere did so as a warlord. Earl Richard was almost certainly an Irish speaker and apatron of Irish bards. He was also the leading magnate in the world of EnglishIreland. This was a world which was increasingly different in its political cultureand behaviour from that of aristocratic and royal England. It was a world ofquerulous 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 daughtersto the earls (as they later became) of Louth, Kildare, and Desmond. But marriagescould 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 secondtime (1317) because his loyalty was called in question during the invasion ofEdward Bruce (1315–18), the brother of King Robert I of Scotland.

In short, the powers that Richard Burgh exercised and the very varied contextsin which he had to operate were a far cry from the world of aristocratic lordshipin England, especially lowland England. There were, of course, continuities fromthe one world to the others; but the differences and the complexities were evengreater. The successful exercise of lordship, especially the lordship of the premiermagnates, was proportionately much more critical to the political and socialhealth of much of Ireland (at least outside the limited, anglicized enclaves) thanit was in England, for Ireland was (in Robin Frame’s phrase) ‘a patchwork oflordships’. When Earl Richard died in 1326 he was complimented by an Irishannalist as ‘the best of the Galls (i.e. English) in Ireland’; but what truly alarmed


contemporaries was the vacuum of lordship that was created by his death. Thatalarm turned into reality in 1333 when Earl Richard’s grandson and heir wasmurdered and left no male heir.⁶³ The effects were catastrophic; it was a crisisof lordship and therefore of power and order. English Ireland in many respectsnever recovered from the blow; that is a measure of how critical to social andpolitical order was the personality of the lord and the continuity of crediblelordship.

That is also the message of the career of the second great aristocrat, EdmundMortimer (d. 1381), earl of March (through the male line) and earl of Ulster (inrespect of his marriage), under consideration here. Whereas Richard Burgh hadlived to a ripe old age (by medieval standards), Earl Edmund was dead by theage of 29. Yet in his short life Edmund demonstrated the interplay of ‘private’wealth and ‘public’ service (albeit that the current ‘private’/‘public’ dichotomyhas limited applicability in a medieval context) in aristocratic society. By themid 1370s Earl Edmund was possibly the third- or fourth-richest earl in termsof 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 wasto outlive him) retained one-third of the Mortimer lands, he still lorded it over ahuge complex of estates in the March of Wales, the English border shires, severalcounties in southern England, and the lordships of Trim and Meath in Ireland.This inheritance was hugely augmented when he acquired in 1368–9 through hiswife, Philippa (one of the ultimate heiresses of Earl Richard Burgh and only childof Lionel, duke of Clarence), vast estates in England and Ireland—includingthe great honour of Clare in East Anglia, manors throughout almost all thecounties of southern England, and the lordships of Ulster and Connacht inIreland.⁶⁴ Earl Edmund doubtless took an interest in the governance and futureof these estates, as is suggested by the record of the oral instructions he gave tohis chief steward, Sir Peter de la Mare, and the detailed arrangements he madewith trustees regarding the estates in 1374.⁶⁵ Much of the detailed running ofthe estates was of course left to his council, his strong team of major officersand his talented bevy of legal advisers.⁶⁶ The remarkable dossier of documentswhich survives from the minority of his son shows how minute and effectivesuch supervision could be. Even so, the lord no doubt had the last word and thewhole administrative and financial machine was geared to provide him with thewherewithal to display his lordship in the ‘public’ sphere.

⁶³ The alarmist letter of Thomas Chedworth is published in Documents on the Affairs of Irelandbefore the King’s Council, ed. G. O. Sayles (Dublin, 1979), no. 155 and re-dated in Frame, EnglishLordship, 35–6.

⁶⁴ For lists of his estates see Holmes, Estates, 10–18. The account of his receiver general for1375 in BL Egerton Roll 8727 gives a conspectus of the English estates in his actual possession atthat 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.


After all, a great and rich aristocrat was expected to play a leading role on thenational stage, unless he was debarred from doing so by illness or some personalinadequacy. Earl Edmund played his role to the full in the few short years givento him. He led a military expedition to Brittany in 1375, raising troops for thepurpose from his Welsh estates. His diplomatic skills were honed in embassies toFrance and in negotiating with the Scots. His greatest military triumphs came inIreland where he served as royal lieutenant from October 1379 and where he methis death. At last the vacuum of lordship which had so catastrophically followedthe death of Earl Richard de Burgh’s grandson in 1333 was now filled by anactive, resident lord. It is no surprise that the Wigmore chronicler (in effect thefamily annalist) waxed ecstatic about his achievements; but other chronicles inIreland and England confirm that he ‘brought almost all that land to peace andgoverned it very nobly and wisely’.⁶⁷ Even if we take such compliments with apinch of salt, they remain as a reminder how crucial vigorous personal lordshipcould be, not least in Ireland.

Nor did Earl Edmund ignore—young as he was—the heavy responsibilitieswhich came his way as a premier English earl and the son-in-law of the lateduke of Clarence. He has been credited by historians as being, quite possibly, themoving 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 ofthe Commons. He was clearly highly regarded by his contemporaries (impressedpossibly both by his wealth and his vigour) as he was appointed a member of thecouncil created to advise the young Richard II in 1377.

The short career of Earl Edmund reflects the very diverse range of activitieswhich composed the life of the higher aristocracy, especially in England. He washead of a dynasty and a household; he ruled a vast landed inheritance stretchingfrom East Anglia through the Welsh March and to the far west of Ireland; hehired a retinue of key administrators and judges to advise him; he was at thecentre of a powerful network of friends (the bishops of London and Herefordand the earl of Northumberland were among his executors and retainers); heraised armies and led campaigns; he served on diplomatic missions; and he didnot fight shy of the treacherous politics of the senility of Edward III and theminority of Richard II. There were few lessons in the exercise of lordship andleadership that Earl Edmund had escaped in his short life.

What sort of personal qualities did he have? The official documents andfinancial accounts (including a list of his creditors)⁶⁸ do not help us greatly in thisrespect. 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) isomitted 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’sAbbey, Dublin, ed. J. T. Gilbert, 2 vols. (London, 1884–6), II, 285.

⁶⁸ BL Egerton Charters 8751.


for his younger son and two daughters.⁶⁹ The Wigmore chronicle had goodreason to praise his devoutness, since he had been spectacularly generous to it inland and ecclesiastical gifts and had personally laid the foundation stone of thenew church there. His piety is borne out by his will—in his insistence on a lack ofostentation 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 educationalbenefactor: Adam Usk, the chronicler, was one of his proteges. His achievementsin Ireland in the last years of his life won unstinting praise from all quarters. Allof this was fairly conventional; but the exceptionally warm tribute paid to him bythe normally restrained Monk of Westminster in his chronicle suggests that hedid indeed stand out for his personal qualities: ‘He was a man of accomplishedmanner and easy address, loyal to his kingdom and sustained in his conduct ofaffairs 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’, ‘theGrim’, ‘the Black’—suggest.⁷¹ He belonged to a family which had risen withastonishing speed to the very top ranks of the Scottish nobility and as suchpresents the remarkable transformation of the higher Scottish aristocracy in thefourteenth 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 JohnBarbour’s epic poem The Bruce, written c.1375. But, as in the histories of allgreat families, each new lord had to put the stamp of his own talent on thefamily’s fortunes if its momentum of success was to be sustained. It was all themore necessary for Archibald to do so because he was born with the taint ofillegitimacy. Two paths in particular suggested themselves as fast-track routesto success (as in all aristocratic societies). The first was service to the king andthe rich rewards it could reap. Archibald secured several such rewards but themost 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 ofGalloway’. He could not control or foresee the second route to success—thedeath of the senior Douglas line without a direct male heir of the body. Butthat is precisely what happened, totally unexpectedly, in 1388, when James, thesecond earl of Douglas, was killed in battle. Archibald now claimed to be theheir to the Douglas earldom and estates (on the basis of an entail made in1342) and used his political clout to ensure that he succeeded. Exploiting allopportunities to the full and doing so ruthlessly was a necessary ingredient ofsuccessful 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 Presentedto Grant G. Simpson, ed. T. Brotherstone and D. Ditchburn (East Linton, 2000), 235–74.


The relative poverty of late medieval Scottish documentation does not allowus to characterize the nature of Archibald the Grim’s lordship in any detail. Wehave none of the detailed financial accounts so common in England, though wecan extrapolate in some measure from the sole surviving rental of another branchof the Douglas family (that of Dalkeith) for 1376–7.⁷² What we do know is thatby 1400 the Douglas estates were the largest territorial agglomeration in Scotlandsouth of the Forth.⁷³ On many of those estates Earl Archibald exercised a range ofpowers—through the grants of regalities by the Scottish kings—such as virtuallyno great aristocrat in England could contemplate. In Galloway in particular hewas not merely landlord and tribute-collector; he was to all intents and purposesregional governor. It is little wonder that Richard II of England in 1393 openednegotiations with him directly and spoke of his ‘lands, lordships and subjects’.⁷⁴He enjoyed what contemporaries called ‘the leadership of all the men of hislands’. English lords occasionally referred to their estates as their ‘country’, butrarely, except possibly in the far north, did lordship have as untrammelled a remitas it did in the great regional lordship of western and northern Scotland.

The ultimate basis and justification of such ample lordship was its capacityto provide military leadership and protection. This was the source of ArchibaldDouglas’s remarkable power, as it was his explanation of the epithets which wereattached to his name. Like Earl Richard of Ulster, he operated in a land of war. Hewas warden of the west march of Scotland for over thirty years; border raids werehis speciality; and he moved around his region with a large military following andcoordinated the military activities of local lairds and their retinues. In short hewas a warlord. The great castle he built at Threave on an island on the Dee, withits seventy-foot high tower, proclaimed to all and sundry, and most immediatelythe 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 worldlyprudence, courage and boldness’, said Walter Bower of him, ‘he excelled the otherScots of his day.’⁷⁵ Archibald operated in a Scottish context and the nature ofhis lordship and leadership was grounded in that context. Lordship always takeson the colour of the social and geographical landscape in which it operates. ButArchibald the Grim—like Richard Burgh and Edmund Mortimer—belongedto a wider, aristocratic, chivalric world and was proud of it. He had foughtat Poitiers; he had gone on diplomatic missions to France and a pilgrimage toSt Denys; he knew the world of knightings and joustings as well as that of borderraids; Jean Froissart himself may well have met him when he stayed with hiscousin, the first earl of Douglas, at Dalkeith in the 1360s. His son was grantedthe 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.)


Richard Burgh, Edmund Mortimer, Archibald Douglas were but three (chosenmore or less at random) of the great lords of the British Isles in the fourteenthcentury. Despite the differences in their circumstances, they were members of acommon aristocratic world. They shared, metaphorically and probably literally,its language; they moved in the same social circles and partook, broadly, of thesame sets of values, anxieties, and ambitions; they cultivated the memories oftheir families in much the same way; they saw themselves as members of a warriorelite and most of them tried to play their part as such. Above all, from our pointof view, they were all lords and exercised, and believed that they had the rightto exercise, lordship. It is the many and very varied ways in which lordship wasdisplayed and exercised which is the theme of the following chapters.


For the English nobility, J. S. Bothwell, Falling from Grace: Reversal of Fortune andthe English Nobility, 1075–1455 (Manchester, 2008). For Edward III’s establish-ment of new earldoms in 1337, J. S. Bothwell, Edward III and the English Peerage:Royal Patronage, Social Mobility and Political Control in Fourteenth-Century Eng-land (Woodbridge, 2004) and more generally M. Prestwich, Plantagenet England,1225–1360 (Oxford, 2005), ch. 13. For the situation in Scotland, A. D. M. Bar-rell, 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 andTrim: 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 onEnglish Landholding in Late Thirteenth-Century Leinster’, Journal of MedievalHistory, 32 (2006); M. Morris, The Bigod Earls of Norfolk in the ThirteenthCentury (Woodbridge, 2005), chs. 4 and 5; R. M. Blakely, The Brus Family inEngland 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’, inThe Exercise of Power in Medieval Scotland, c.1200–1500, ed. S. Boardman andA. Ross (Dublin, 2003).

For heraldry in Scotland, B. McAndrew, Scotland’s Historic Heraldry (Wood-bridge, 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, TheVisual Culture of Wales: Medieval Vision (Cardiff, 2003), ch. 2, and for the Des-pensers and Tewksbury abbey, M. Lawrence, ‘Secular Patronage and ReligiousDevotion: The Despensers and St Mary’s Abbey, Tewksbury’, in FourteenthCentury England V, ed. N. Saul (Woodbridge, 2008). For the Wigmore abbey


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 (Doning-ton, 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. Stober, Late MedievalMonasteries and their Patrons: England and Wales, c.1300–1540 (Woodbridge,2007), and for the nobility and the church in general, R. Marks, Image andDevotion 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 How-lat ’, in A Companion to Medieval Scottish Poetry, ed. P. Bawcutt and J. HadleyWilliams (Woodbridge, 2006).

For the keeping of records by the aristocracy see Catalogue of Medieval Munimentsat Berkeley Castle, ed. B. Wells-Furby. Bristol and Gloucestershire ArchaeologicalSociety vols. 17 and 18 (Bristol, 2004); N. Ramsay, ‘Archive Books’, in TheCambridge History of the Book in Britain. Volume II, 1100–1400, ed. N. Morganand R. Thomson (Cambridge, 2008). For the phenomenon in Gaelic Scotland,S. Boardman, ‘The Campbells and Charter Lordship in Medieval Argyll’, inThe Exercise of Power in Medieval Scotland, c.1200–1500, ed. S. Boardmanand A. Ross (Dublin, 2003). For Brittany, M. Jones, ‘Memory, Invention andthe Breton State: The First Inventory of the Ducal Archives (1395) and theBeginnings of Montfort Historiography’, Journal of Medieval History, 33 (2007).

For Richard de Burgh, earl of Ulster, R. Frame, ‘Historians, Aristocrats andPlantagenet Ireland, 1200–1360’, in War, Government and Aristocracy in theBritish Isles c.1150–1500: Essays in Honour of Michael Prestwich, ed. C. Given-Wilson, A. Kettle, and L. Scales (Woodbridge, 2008). For Edmund Mortimer,A. Dunn, ‘Richard II and the Mortimer Inheritance’, in Fourteenth CenturyEngland II, ed. C. Given-Wilson (Woodbridge, 2002). For the earls of Arundel,M. Burtscher, The Fitzalans: Earls of Arundel and Surrey, Lords of the WelshMarches (1267–1415) (Logaston, 2008). For contemporary criticism of lordshipin Ireland, B. Smith, Colonisation and Conquest in Medieval Ireland: The Englishin 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 thedirect male line of the body, succession through females or by males not of the directline of the body, and the recruitment of members of the royal family among the ranksof comital and ducal families in England, Scotland, and English Ireland 1280–1420.Multiple comital and/or ducal titles held by individuals are also indicated whereverpossible. The following caveats in particular need to be borne in mind:

1. The choice of twenty-year intervals is arbitrary and can conceal important changesbetween those intervals.

2. Minorities, widowhoods, and succession through females are often not fully oradequately represented in the tables.

3. For reasons of space, shorthand entries (e.g. Bohun, Stewart, Fitz Gerald) may wellconceal several different members of the same family over several generations.

4. Several complex or contested successions (especially for Scottish earldoms) have hadto be simplified or overlooked. Others are uncertain. Full details and corrections areavailable 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. subEngland, 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 1280 1300 1320 1340 1360 1380 1400 1420Title

1. Arundel Fitzalan Fitzalan Fitzalan Fitzalan Fitzalan (35) Fitzalan2. Aumale Thomas of

Lancaster (7)3. Bedford John, d. of

(29)4. Buckingham Thomas of

Woodstock(14,11)

5. Cambridge Wm of Juliers Wm of Juliers Edmund ofLangley (39)

Edward ofYork •1415

6. Chester (king) (king) Edward s.of Edward II

Ed. BlackPrince (8)

BlackPrince (8)

(king) Henry ofMonmouth(8)

(king)

7. Clarence Lionel•1368

Thomas ofLancaster (2)

8. Cornwall Edmund ofCornwall

Edmund ofCornwall

BlackPrince (6)

BlackPrince (6)

(king) Henry ofMonmouth(6)

(king)

9. Derby Henry ofLancaster(19,20–22)

Henry ofLancaster•1361(19,20–22)

HenryBolingbroke

10. Devon Courtenay Courtenay Courtenay Courtenay Courtenay11. Dorset Beaufort

•142012. Essex Bohun (15) Bohun (15) Bohun (15) Bohun (15)

†136113. Exeter Beaufort

14. Gloucester Clare (16) ∗[Montherner] ∗Audley•1347

Humphrey,duke (28)

15. Hereford Bohun (12) Bohun (12) Bohun (12)•1336

† Bohun (12) Bohun (12)•1361

16. Hertford Clare (14) ∗[Monthermer]17. Hunting-

donClinton•1354

Holland Holland

18. Kent John ofWoodstock•1352

∗Holland∗Black Prince

Holland Holland

19. Lancaster EdmundCrouchback(20)

Thomas ofLancaster (20)

Thomas ofLancaster(20,21)

† Henry ofLancaster(20,21)

Henry ofGrosmont(20,21) •1361

∗Johnof Gaunt(9,20,21)

20. Leicester Edmund (19) Thomas (19) Thomas(19,21)

Henry (19) Henry •1361(19,21)

∗John ofGaunt (9,1921)

21. Lincoln Lacy Lacy •1311 Thos. ofLancaster(19,20)

Henry ofGrosmont(19,20) •1361

∗John ofGaunt(9,19,20)

22. March (custody) Mortimer Mortimer (minority) Mortimer•1425

23. Norfolk Bigod Bigod •1306 Thos. ofBrotherton•1334

∗Margaret hisdaughter

∗Margaret ∗Margaret•1399

∗Mowbray•1405 (26)

24. Northamp-ton

Bohun jr Bohun jr•1360

25. Northum-berland

Percy Percy Percy

26. Notting-ham

Mowbray•1383

Mowbray (26) Mowbray (26)

27. Oxford Vere Vere Vere † Vere Vere Vere † Vere Vere

Table 1. continued


28. Pembroke ?Valence ?Valence Valence•1324

† Hastings Hastings Hastings•1387

Humphrey d.of Gloucester(14)

29. Richmond John ofBrittany

John ofBrittany

John ofBrittany•1334

† John ofBrittany•1334

John of Gaunt J. de Montfort•1399

John dukeof Bedford(29)

30. Rutland Edward ofYork •1415

31. Salisbury Montague Montague Montague•1397

† Montague Montague•1428

32. Somerset Beaufort ( )33. Stafford Stafford Stafford † Stafford Stafford34. Suffolk Ufford Ufford Ufford •1382 de la Pole † de la Pole35. Surrey Warenne Warenne Warenne Warenne

•1347

∗Fitzalan (1) HollandFitzalan (1)•1415

36. Warwick Beauchamp Beauchamp (Beauchamp) Beauchamp Beauchamp Beauchamp Beauchamp Beauchamp37. Westmore-

landNeville Neville

38. Worcester Percy jnr•1403

39. York Edmund ofLangley (5)

Table 2. Scotland


1. Albany Stewart(4,10,14)

Stewart(10,14)

2. Angus Umfraville Umfraville (Umfraville) (Umfraville)Stewart

}(Umfraville)Stewart

(Umfraville)•1403∗MargaretStewart

∗Douglas Douglas

3. Atholl Strathbogie (Strathbogie) (Strathbogie)Douglas

}(Strathbogie)•1369

Stewart6, 18 • 1402

Stewart

4. Buchan Comyn Comyn •1308 ∗(Beaumont) Stewart Stewart (17)•1424

5. Caithness Magnus•1284

†John Magnus Stewart(19) •

∗EuphemiaStewart

Stewart

6. Carrick Bruce Bruce Stewart Stewart (3,18)•1402

7. Crawford Crawford Crawford8. Douglas Douglas Douglas •1388 †Douglas Douglas9. Dunbar Dunbar Dunbar ? ? Dunbar

•1368†Dunbar Dunbar Dunbar

10. Fife Duncan ? Duncan Duncan ∗?Isabella Stewart(1,14)

Stewart Stewart

11. Lennox Malcolm Malcolm Malcolm ? Donald ∗Margaret ∗Duncan Duncan12. Mar William Donald Donald Thomas (∗Douglas) ∗(Isabel) ∗Stewart13. March See Dunbar14. Menteith ∗Alexander †Murdoch (∗Mary?) (∗Margaret) Stewart

(1,14)Stewart Stewart

Table 2. continued


15. Moray Randolph †Randolph•1346

∗Dunbar•1368

†Dunbar Dunbar Dunbar

16. Orkney Held jointlywith Caithnessuntil c.1350

∗Sinclair Sinclair Sinclair •1424

17. Ross William William William William•1372

(∗Euphemia) ∗Leslie •1402 Stewart •1424

18. Rothesay Stewart (3,6)•1402

19. Strathearn Malise Malise Malise ( ) Stewart Stewart (5) (∗EuphemiaStewart)

∗Graham

20. Sutherland William William William † William William21. Wigtown Fleming Douglas

Table 3. English Ireland

Comital Title 1280 1300 1320 1340 1360 1380 1400 1420

1. Desmond (created1329)

Fitz Gerald ( ) †Fitz Gerald Fitz Gerald Fitz Gerald

2. Kildare (created1316)

Fitz Gerald ( ) †Fitz Gerald Fitz Gerald Fitz Gerald Fitz Gerald •1432

3. Louth (created1319)

Bermingham•1329

4. Ormond (created1328)

( ) Butler Butler Butler Butler

5. Ulster (created1205)

de Burgh de Burgh de Burgh (∗Elizabeth) ∗Lionel ofClarence

∗Mortimer (Mortimer) Mortimer •1425

2Display and Magnificence

The medieval aristocracy lived a life of ostentatious display. From the momentof their birth to the day of their interment—and indeed even beyond thatpoint, since commemorative rituals were part of the cult of perpetuating theirmemories—nobles participated in, and were at the centre of, a theatrical roundof display and celebration. Their residences and lifestyle set them apart; sodid their troupes of servants, retainers, and guests. Conspicuous display andconspicuous expenditure were not optional extras; they were at the very heart ofcontemporary notions of lordship. If a lord was to earn the ‘worship’ of followersand dependants he must do so recurrently by displaying his pre-eminence and byparading his largesse, and by doing so publicly. That is why social commentatorsin the later Middle Ages deplored the growing tendency of the nobility towithdraw into their chambers rather than conduct their domestic lives in public.More comfortable and intimate such private living might have been; but itweakened the necessary visibility and public impressiveness of lordship. RobertGrosseteste had put the point forcefully in his famous advice to nobles in themid thirteenth century: ‘you yourself be seated at all times in the middle of thehigh table, so that your presence as lord and lady be made manifest to all.’ Itwas in that fashion, he added, and by having a well-drilled staff of servants, thatthe lord would earn ‘great fear and reverence’.¹ ‘Fear’, ‘reverence’, ‘worship’ werecentral concepts in the cult or lordship; they were inculcated and sustained by aconstant and visible emphasis on the superiority and apartness of lordship.

Greater lords needed to be set apart from the generality of lords (domini) ina 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 asuite of honorific titles—baron, earl, marquis, viscount, duke—which declaredterminologically the distance between them and the rest of knightly and gentlesociety. It was part of the process of stratification (to borrow McFarlane’s phrase)and increasing social exclusivity which characterizes the later Middle Ages. Ofthese labels of superiority, ‘earl’ was much the oldest. It was in origin no morethan a term for a man of high birth; but in the limited fashion it was employedand 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 1300was the title borne by more than twenty-five men at any given time. In factsuch figures were rarely achieved. The number of earls dwindled steadily acrossthe late twelfth and thirteenth centuries; by 1300 the title was reserved foreleven men (albeit several of them holding more than one earldom). Earls werethe creme de la creme of the higher aristocracy, their honorific titles settingthem clearly apart from, and above, the rest of the aristocracy. The otherhonorific title—‘baron’—had undergone a rather similar evolution. Originallyin the Norman period it was a term used to refer simply and generically tothe leading vassals and followers of great lords. During the thirteenth century,however, it began to acquire connotations of social exclusivity and superiorityand shed its feudal connections.³ Ambitious lords adopted and flaunted the term‘baron’—for example ‘the baron of Stafford’—to indicate the social and statusdistance between themselves and lesser lords. Combined as it was—or frequentlycame to be—with an individual summons to parliament, the baronage becamein effect a titled nobility, a grade within the peerage. Richard II acknowledgedthe transformation in 1387 when he raised his confidant, John Beauchamp, andthe male heirs of his body to ‘the status and title of lord of Beauchamp and baronof Kidderminster’ by letters patent.

‘Earl’ and ‘baron’ were at least old terms, albeit that they had now becomemore exclusive in their usage. But the search for an exclusive social terminologyfor the higher aristocracy—‘illustrious personages’ as Edward III termed themwhen he created a batch of six new earls in 1337—was not satisfied by thesetwo well-established labels. In that very year 1337 the title of duke was conferredfor the first time, on the king’s eldest son, Edward. It was a title largely reservedfor members of the royal family; but already in 1351 it was bestowed on anon-royal peer when Henry, earl of Lancaster, was promoted to be duke of thesame county. The title of duke remained a rare privilege: only forty-five dukeswere created 1337–1500 and even the extravagant Richard II limited ducalcreations during his reign to nine (including promoting Margaret Marshal fromcountess to duchess of Norfolk). Typically it was Richard II who also introduceda 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 whichfound favour in England. Indeed in 1399 John Beaufort declined to resumethe title of marquis of Dorset because, in his own words, ‘the title of marquesswas a strange title in this realm.’⁴ The same fate was to befall the final title ofhonour—viscount—which was first bestowed in 1440. What this proliferationand refinement of titles indicates is the growing habit of the higher aristocracyto demarcate itself terminologically from the rest of noble society and, then, tointroduce 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.]


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 thataristocratic society, especially in England and English Ireland, was kingship-focussed and kingship-dominated. The general, though not universal, custom inEngland in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries was that the title of earl couldnot be assumed (even where the hereditary descent was clear) without a formalprocess of investiture with sword and belt by the king. This was to remain clearlythe practice with regard to new creations in the later Middle Ages.⁵ Thus on6 April 1385, Richard II created Michael de la Pole earl of Suffolk and girded himwith the sword. Creations could be conditional: thus when Thomas Beaufortwas promoted from earl of Dorset to be duke of Exeter in November 1416, itwas specifically stated that the latter dignity was to be his for life only. Royallargesse 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 Devonand Aumale. But Edward I’s ambitions thwarted any expectations he may haveentertained, and he had to wait over forty years, until 1335, before he waseventually 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 therecognition of aristocratic power and the assumption of heritability of honours aswell as of land were well-established norms. So it was that the presumption thathonorific titles—such as earl or baron—were hereditary in character increasinglyestablished itself, much in the same way (as we have seen) that individualsummonses to parliament became increasingly hereditary within families. Thepractice with regard to succession to earldoms is particularly revealing in thisrespect. For most of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the heir to an earldomdid not succeed to the dignity of earl until he had been ceremoniously girdedwith the sword of the county. The ceremony was a reminder that earldomswere royal creations and that indeed they had an official responsibility, at leasthistorically, for the administration of the county with which their names wereassociated. The last known occasion when the heir to an earldom was girdedwith 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 canbe said to be from that date formally hereditary. It is a reminder that the nexusof power in later medieval monarchies (including England and Scotland) wascomposed of a delicate and nuanced balance between royal will and aristocraticambition.

⁵ GEC IV, Appendix H.


Earldoms may have become hereditary; but the scope for royal creation andintervention, and therewith for lavish ceremonies to display the royal munificenceto all the world, was still ample. Kings could and did decide regularly on disputedor ambiguous succession; they could show favour to the non-comital husband ofa comital or ducal heiress; they could create a batch of new titles (as Edward IIIdid in 1337 or Richard II in 1397); they could promote men from one rank toanother within the peerage. All these were occasions when king and magnatescould display their love of pomp and ceremony to the full. No one excelledEdward III as the master of such ceremonies. When he created his second andthird sons dukes of Lancaster and Clarence respectively on 13 November 1362he did so in the full publicity of parliament, girding them with a sword andconferring fur-trimmed caps and coronets on them. The Scottish kings soonpicked up the title and the ceremony as means of entrenching the house of Stewartvisually and honorifically at the apex of aristocratic society. King Robert III chosethe monastery of Scone as the venue in April 1398 for elevating his son andbrother to be dukes of Rothesay and Albany. He decorated them and bestowedfur mantles on them solemnly along ‘with other insignia appropriate only fordukes’.⁶ Medieval society exulted in the visual; nothing demonstrated better itslove of display and its cult of calibrated social and honorific hierarchies than theceremonies which set the titled nobility apart from the rest of society, includinggentle society.

This cult of exclusivity was also paraded in the formal titles and addressesof the aristocracy. As titles aggregated in fewer hands, their style became a rollcall 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 andLeicester, steward of England, and lord of Bergerac and Beaufort’. Even morestriking were the epithets of power and superiority which came to characterizetheir correspondence. Thus ‘noble’, ‘powerful’, and ‘valiant’ (strenuus) were theadjectives which the countess of Pembroke in 1368 deployed to describe herhusband, John Hastings. Similar terms of flattery and respect were used toaddress Scottish earls: ‘noble and powerful lord’, ‘most revered prince’, ‘nobleand powerful and dread lord’. Addresses outbid each other in the grovellingformulae they used: ‘To the magnificent, noble and powerful lord, AlexanderStewart, earl of Buchan, lord of Ross and Badenoch, lieutenant of the lordour king and justiciar in the land north of the river Forth’.⁷ There seems tobe an undoubted inflation in the language of deference across our period andthe greater aristocracy were its prime beneficiaries. So it was, for example, in1422 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.


by ‘the seals of my most dread lords (metuendissimorum dominorum meorum),the earls of March, Devon and Salisbury’.⁸ This inflation of terms of deferencecontinued to soar, as the higher nobility were greeted as ‘right high and mightyprince’. As the usage of the word ‘prince’ suggests, one of the consequencesof the inflation of the language of deference was the need to calibrate furtherthe gradations of power and honour within the elite itself. Princes of theroyal blood were in particular anxious to stress that they belonged to a super-league even within the higher aristocracy. So it was that John of Gaunt, asduke of Lancaster and the surviving eldest son of Edward III, exacted the mostdemeaning submission from Henry Percy, earl of Northumberland, in November1381. Percy was required to acknowledge Gaunt as ‘the greatest lord and highestperson of the realm’.⁹ We might dismiss such flattering references as formulaicand hyperbolic; but that would be to miss their point. They were part of theterminology of exclusivity and superiority; they proclaimed to the world thereputation and eminence of their bearers. Thus when Alexander Stewart earl ofMar (by marriage) died in 1435 he was appropriately memorialized as ‘a manof great wealth and lavish expenditure, holder of a celebrated name, the objectof much talk in distant places’.¹⁰ Nobility had to be seen, acknowledged, andparaded.

Great wealth lavishly and proudly displayed was one of the hallmarks oflordship. Consumption, expenditure, largesse were essential manifestations of ahierarchy of status. Nothing less was expected. It is true that, at life’s end or inmoments of spiritual introspection, doubts might creep in as to the proprietyof such practices. Duke Henry of Lancaster (d. 1361) in his spiritual self-examination, Le Livre de Seyntz Medicines, aired his conscience on the matter.The pious bachelor Earl Humphrey of Hereford (d. 1361) went further. Inhis will he instructed that ‘all those jewels which we have delighted to look atduring our lifetime’ should be ‘sold and the money so raised used for alms’. EarlHumphrey’s conscience was particularly tender for he instructed his executors tospend a further ten thousand marks (£6,666 13s. 4d .), by the advice of friars, inchantries 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 remorsecould not conceal or undo the fact that extravagance of display lay at the heartof lordship.

It manifested itself in a whole variety of ways, which will only be touchedupon 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 givenbelow unless the will in question is quoted from another source.


dress was a striking way of setting the aristocracy apart.¹² The quality of thevarious cloth, silks, and fine linens from which their clothes were cut was of thefinest 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 histailor employed for 244 days on end in October 1387–June 1388 in the lord’swardrobe at London preparing the earl’s clothes. A single outfit might cost asubstantial sum: £13 6s. was spent on one outfit (including gold cloth and linedwith fur) for the young earl of March (d. 1398) in 1393 and a further £9 for goldcloth decorated with golden lions for the earl and George Felbrigg, one of hisconfidants. Figures of this order are in no way exceptional. And as the exampleof Felbrigg suggests, the lord’s extravagance in dress extended to encompass hisservants, retainers, and followers, dressed in his own livery. The strain that suchsartorial display placed on seigniorial finances is amply illustrated in householdaccounts. The account of the clerk of the great wardrobe of Henry Bolingbrokefor 1395–6 may serve as an illustration: of total expenditure (exclusive of thecosts 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 alist of the rich London merchants who profited from Henry’s extravagance. Thewealth and commerce of London underpinned the ability of aristocratic lordshipto display its power and largesse.¹³

Aristocratic wealth was, of course, displayed in many other forms. Theirresidences and parks were a manifestation of their apartness; so were theirlifestyles and leisure activities. To these we will return. For those admitted totheir halls and houses, their tapestries and hangings, their coffers and beds, theirrich ecclesiastical vestments and items of their chapels all proclaimed their wealthand apartness. The care with which individual items were described in their willsor listed in their inventories or catalogued by royal commissioners (as happenedto the personal effects of Thomas, duke of Gloucester (d. 1397) at his housein London and residence at Pleshy in Essex) reveal the delight they took intheir household goods, especially those with strong family associations.¹⁴ RogerMortimer, first earl of March (d. 1330) was the proud owner of a white bedof buckram powdered with butterflies (butterflies seem to have been a favouritemotif 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 listof 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 SumptuaryLaws’, 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 greatwardrobe account).

¹⁴ CIM 1392–9, no. 372; Viscount Dillon and W. J. St. John Hope, ‘Inventory of theGoods . . . of Thomas, Duke of Gloucester’, Archaeological Journal, 54 (1897), 275–311.


marked with her arms; while Edmund Mortimer, earl of March (d. 1381) tookthe trouble to describe a salt cellar in the shape of a lion and another in the shapeof a dog in his will.¹⁵ (Salts were high-prestige objects and were placed at thelord’s right hand on the table.) Examples such as these abound; they reflect thedelight in the visual and in items of opulence.

A delight in sumptuous clothes, rich furnishings, and valuable householdgoods was not, of course, confined to the higher aristocracy; but in a strictlyhierarchical society there was, and was expected to be, a correlation betweenopulence, wealth, and status. It was for that very reason that contemporariesbelieved that an earl, for example, should have sufficient income in lands andwealth—a ‘competence’ as they termed it—to sustain his status and lifestyle.Hence they set the minimum yearly competence for an earl at a thousandmarks (£666 13s. 4d .). But there were also insignia which set the greateraristocracy apart. Coronets increasingly figure in the historical evidence in thefourteenth century and not only for royal dukes: the earl of Arundel in hiswill in 1376 left his best coronet (which suggests that he had several) to hisson, and the earl of March in 1381 left a particularly splendid coronet adornedwith jewellery and pearls to his daughter, and referred to another coronet withroses. On what occasions such coronets might with propriety be worn is notaltogether clear; but their very existence is another indication of the inflation ofsplendour and apartness in the ranks of the greater nobility. So likewise werethe banners which had long since been one of the signs of aristocratic status:the Mowbray earl of Norfolk (d. 1432) commissioned a painter to preparenine pennons and twenty standards of worsted of the arms of Mowbray in1415 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 Mowbraycould claim descent). He also spent £10 on eight tunics for his herald ofarms.¹⁶ Heralds—along with henchmen, pursuivants, and sword-bearers—wereamong the personnel who helped to proclaim the distinctiveness and splendourof the aristocratic menage to the world as it progressed across the countyand attended jousts and tournaments. Edmund Mortimer (d. 1381) rewardedhis herald of arms, ‘naming him March’, with the not inconsiderable fee often marks annually. John of Gaunt was regularly attended by a troupe ofheralds, especially on major social occasions such as the feast of Epiphany or atjousts.¹⁷

Aristocratic power and apartness were not only displayed in sumptuousness ofdress and lifestyle but also in the power of command their holder could exerciseover 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).


return below. A lord’s standing was measured not only in wealth and estatesbut in the depth and extent of the numbers whom he attracted, directly orindirectly, into his service and following, be it as servants, dependants, clients,or retainers. Both parties wished this relationship to be celebrated publicly sothat all the world could take note of it, and there was no better way of doing sothan by the distribution of livery, collars and badges bearing the lord’s coloursor insignia. The evidence is abundant. Thus when Sir Adam Swillington enteredthe service of Thomas earl of Lancaster (d. 1322) in 1317 with ten men, ofwhom three were to be knights, it was stipulated that when Swillington came atthe earl’s beck to parliament or other assemblies, his knights should be dressedin the earl’s robes.¹⁸ Wearing the lord’s livery was a sure indication of personalcommitment, as the supporters of the duke of Gloucester and the earls of Arundeland Warwick in autumn 1397 found to their cost when Richard II staged hiscoup against them.¹⁹ Livery badges and collars—such as the famous Lancastrianlinked S—were increasingly popular ways of displaying the bond between lordand follower; they were at once badges of honour and badges of service. And atmoments of high political drama a lord might distribute a distinctive uniformeven more generally to followers who were not tied to him by any formal orpermanent bond. When Earl Roger of March (d. 1398) returned from Irelandto the highly charged political atmosphere in England in early 1398, a vastcrowd of supporters, wearing hoods in his colours of red and green, went out tomeet him.²⁰

Robes, liveries, badges and collars have, of course, long figured prominentlyin the historiography of the later medieval aristocracy; but perhaps they havetoo often been packaged as part of the analysis of ‘bastard feudalism’ andmarshalled in arguments about the loyalty (or otherwise) of dependants andretainers. These are clearly valid and rewarding approaches; but it could bethat academic historians—who lead lives of cloistered routine and studiedunderstatement—underestimate the calculated dazzle, the visual theatre, and thesemiotics 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 wasnot without reason that the public venue of the lord’s living was known as thedomus magnificencie, the household of magnificence (as opposed to the domusprovidencie, the household below stairs). Great magnates, like kings, held courtssplendidly, especially at the high religious festivals of Christmas, Easter, andWhitsun, and doubtless invited large numbers of guests to attend. Richard earl ofGloucester (d. 1262) held court in a particularly splendid manner near Gloucesterin 1248; while the earls of Warwick, according to tradition, celebrated the highfeasts 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.


Claverdon and Tamworth in Arden.²¹ The Anglo-Irish magnates followed suitespecially when they came to Dublin: in 1329 the city was overwhelmed withhigh 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 wereacts of gastronomic propaganda—displaying largesse and winning hearts andminds through social flattery. The numbers involved could be very large: it wascalculated that even a second-rank lord, Thomas Berkeley (d. 1361), fed at least300 persons each day at his table. Nor was it merely a matter of numbers; italso involved sensitive calculations as to who was invited to sit where and whatnumber of dishes they were, or were not, served. Thus when Philip Darcy agreedto serve Henry, earl of Lancaster (d. 1345) in 1327, it was stipulated that he andhis 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 careand strict etiquette which governed them. Much of it was no doubt formal butall of it, consciously or otherwise, was meant to redound to the lord’s honourand reputation and to affirm, and confirm, the social hierarchy over which heruled. Events were conducted with calculated publicity. Thus when Sir AdamSwillington (see above) swore to be a good and loyal retainer of Earl Thomasof Lancaster in 1317, he took his oath on the Gospels ‘in the presence of thesaid earl and of bannerets and other bachelors’. The context of the ceremonyon 28 February 1377 in the chapel of the Savoy palace was rather different,but the emphasis on publicity was the same. There, surrounded by membersof his council and household, John of Gaunt, duke of Lancaster (d. 1399)solemnly appointed Thomas Thelwall to be chancellor of the duchy and countyof Lancaster.²⁴ Lordship was conducted in the public gaze; it was display andpublicity which manifested its power. Its largesse was likewise publicly andregularly displayed, extending its network of obligation and gratitude over a widesocial and geographical spectrum. Thus a few entries from the register of theBlack Prince showed how he lived up to his self-proclaimed reputation that hewas 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 andsmall; more than twenty recipients shared twenty-seven pipes of wine throughhis munificence; Lady Isabel de Trokesford was granted a small gold ring whenshe dined with the Prince; and a lucky minstrel who was present at a tournamentat Bury came away with a horse. And to this regular distribution of individualgifts 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.


The aristocracy lived, therefore, a life of calculated and ostentatious display.But—as with all orders of society—there were occasions and rites of passagewhen such public display was particularly carefully choreographed for maximumeffect. Birth and baptism were one such occasion. Baptism normally followedwithin a few days of the birth (though it might be delayed by the late arrivalof a distinguished ecclesiastic or godparent). In the case of the four children ofEdmund, 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 performedthe christening, and the godparents were chosen from leading ecclesiastics andlay men and women. Thus Earl Edmund’s fourth son, another Edmund, wasborn at Ludlow on 9 November 1376 and baptized there by the abbot of theMortimer monastery of Wigmore nine days later. The abbot of Evesham andLady Audley served as godparents, the bishop of Bangor arriving too late for theceremony. The news of the birth would be broadcast far and wide, not only toclose members of the family but to tenants and dependants. In 1372 the tenantsof Richard’s Castle took the trouble to record the birth of the son and heir ofJohn Talbot in the missal of the local church ‘because they intended the saidheir in the future to be their lord’. It is a reminder that a private event wasin the world of lordship an occasion of public significance and was recognizedas such.²⁶

It was also an occasion for family solidarity and lavish gift-giving. Seigniorialaccounts regularly record the handsome gifts which were given to messengersbringing news of a family birth. But such gifts were only the beginning ofa splurge of largesse. One example (albeit at the highest level of the scale ofmunificence) will serve as an example. When John of Gaunt heard the news thatthe 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 September1382 he opened the sluice gates of his generosity to the full. His baptismal giftsto his infant niece included a pair of silver bowls, gilded and engraved on theirborders 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 ahanap with a lid of silver (£44). It was not only the young baby who benefitedfrom the ducal munificence: money gifts totalling £18 6s. 8d . were distributedto two of the ladies-in-waiting of the baby’s mother, nurse, midwife, valet andpage, 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. Allin all, the round of presents had cost the duke about £115, equivalent to a verycomfortable annual income for a substantial knight. Great lords clearly did notstint in gift-giving.²⁷

²⁶ Wigmore chronicle in Dugdale, Monasticon VI, 1, 354; L. B. Smith, ‘Proofs of Age in MedievalWales’, Bulletin of the Board of Celtic Studies, 38 (1991), 134–44, at p. 142.

²⁷ Reg. JG, II, no. 803.


The next rite of passage in which the young aristocrat was involved was theritual of knighting. It was the solemn entry into the order of chivalry and assuch was an inevitable occasion for sumptuous display and magnificence, oftenaccompanied by jousts, feasts, and round tables. Families treasured the memoriesof such occasions: the Mortimer chronicle, for example, recorded the knightingceremonies of Edmund (d. 1304), Roger (d. 1330) and Edmund (d. 1331) insome detail. The knighting of Roger was particularly memorable, for it was part ofthe remarkable Feast of the Swans held at Westminster at Whitsuntide (22 May)1306. This was the hugely theatrical occasion when Edward I knighted his eldestson Edward, alongside almost 300 other aspirant knights.²⁸ This was a grandpolitical act, a calculated act of involving the chivalrous class—now a much moreselective and exclusive group than it had been a century earlier—in Edward I’scommitment to take vengeance on the treacherous Scots. To be knighted by theking 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 ofpublishing its social superiority. So it is that we hear, for example, of Richardde Burgh, earl of Ulster (d. 1326), holding a great feast at Pentecost 1308 atTrim where he knighted Walter and Hugh Lacy. Edmund Butler (d. 1321), theancestor of the earls of Ormond, was more ambitious, creating thirty knights ata feast in Dublin in 1313.²⁹ Chivalrous practices had also long since entrenchedthemselves in Scottish aristocratic culture, so it comes as no surprise to learnthat Alexander Stewart, earl of Mar (d. 1435), knighted five of his kinsmen andsupporters on the eve of a continental campaign.³⁰

Most aristocratic knightings were probably done individually and as such arerarely recorded. But the conferment of knighthood was a further bond betweena lord and his dependants; it was a visual act of aristocratic bonding. So itis that we hear that Edmund, earl of March (d. 1381), knighted his brotherThomas—the man who was in effect to manage the Mortimer estates afterEdmund’s death—and granted him a life annuity to maintain his status; thesame Earl Edmund likewise gave the order of knighthood to one of his closefollowers, Sir Henry Conway.³¹ Indeed lords might jealously guard the privilegeof granting the arms of knighthood to their followers. When the Anglo-Irish lordJames Butler, earl of Ormond (d. 1382), retained the services of Oliver Howellin 1356, Oliver agreed that he would receive the arms of knighthood from theearl rather than from other lords, provided the earl behaved towards Oliver ‘asany lord ought to do so to the person who received military arms from him’.³²Conferring the arms of knighthood was not only an initiation ceremony intothe 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.


for a great lord such as the earl of Ormond or the earl of March to displaypublicly the ceremonial powers he controlled and his role as master of chivalry.For knightings were occasions for expressing aristocratic wealth and pageantryto 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 atMoreton Valence on 18 August 1297.³³

Marriage was the next rite of passage in which aristocratic largesse and munifi-cence were at a premium. Indeed betrothal might long pre-date knighting, for thechildren of the aristocracy (as of kings) were often betrothed as infants—subject,of course, to the requirement that betrothal could only be converted into amarriage when the partners were of an age to give their consent freely andto 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, fiveyears his senior. The ceremony took place at the Tower of London and wasfollowed by a lavish tournament attended by many of the leading earls of therealm.³⁴ When marriage (as contrasted with betrothal) eventually took place thecelebrations were even more prolonged and opulent. We catch their character inthe description of the Monk of Westminster of the wedding ceremony at Arundelcastle in July 1384 when Thomas Mowbray, earl of Nottingham, married theearl of Arundel’s daughter. It was clearly the wedding of the season; and theexceptionally 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 freeto come and go. The wedding was attended by the king and queen with their entirehousehold; all received a smiling welcome from the earl, who gave each of them a presentaccording 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. Thesummer of 1290 was particularly spectacular in that respect. Edward I marriedtwo of his daughters: the one, the eighteen-year-old Joan of Acre, to the elderlyearl of Gloucester (d. 1295), the other, Margaret, to John son of the duke ofBrabant. The marriages were part of a grand family and diplomatic strategy, asEdward settled the descent of the kingdom at a particularly critical juncture—inthe wake of the death of his wife and three of his four sons. Hard bargainingabout the terms of the marriages had been in train for months and indeedyears, bargaining in which the king clearly had the whip hand and exercised itto his maximum advantage. But once the terms had been settled, no expensewas spared in giving the maximum publicity to the nuptials. We can guess thescale 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.


426 minstrels ‘as well English as others’ at the marriage of Margaret. Nor didthe celebrations end with the royally sponsored wedding. Two months after hismarriage to Joan in May 1290, the earl of Gloucester laid on a great banquetat Clerkenwell in honour of his youthful bride.³⁶ Festivities often included acelebratory tournament such as the one held at Leicester in 1344 on the occasionof the marriage of Ralph Stafford (the future first earl of Stafford) to the daughterof Henry of Grosmont, earl of Lancaster, or a round table such as the one whichwas held in the presence of the king, earls, and barons at Waltham abbey onthe marriage of the young earl of Gloucester (d. 1314) to the daughter of theearl of Ulster, Richard de Burgh (d. 1326). And as at baptism, so at marriagean obligatory ritual of gift-giving—precisely calibrated in value according tothe status of donor and donee—followed. Thus John of Gaunt gave a silverewer and other valuables worth £9 to Lady Ferrers as a gift on the day of hermarriage, but was understandably much more lavish in the presents he gave tohis son, Henry Bolingbroke, on his marriage to Mary, co-heiress of the Bohunearldom of Hereford—including rewards to the ten minstrels sent by the kingand four by Edmund of Langley to liven up the occasion.³⁷ Weddings andbetrothals and the rituals and pageantry which characterized them were greatsocial and celebratory occasions at all levels of society; but aristocratic weddingswere a particular and public occasion for affirming the bonds and commonethos of aristocratic society (whatever private animosities lay behind the veneerof sustained jollity) and for displaying the wealth and opulence of the mostexclusive club in the land.

Gilbert de Clare, earl of Gloucester (d. 1295) had married his adolescentbride—and in effect disowned his children by a previous marriage—on 30 April1290. By 7 December 1295—having in the meantime fathered four chil-dren—he was dead. And so we come to the last of the rites of passage in whichthe aristocracy, like other orders of society, could manifest its status: death.Short of death itself, there might be occasions of leave-taking during lifetimewhich were converted into occasions for proclaiming the lord’s standing and thedepth of the loyalty he commanded. Departure on crusade, on campaign, onpilgrimage, or to a tournament (as in the famous representation of Sir GeoffreyLuttrell leaving for the jousts shows vividly), or to parliament could all beoccasions in which a lord’s servants and followers might assemble, some of themto 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 fromhis travels, he could expect an impressive reception party to meet him. Thuswhen Richard Beauchamp, earl of Warwick (d. 1439), returned to England in1409 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.


to await his arrival.³⁸ Short of death itself, the enforced political exile of thelord could provide an occasion to demonstrate the support and affection whichgood lordship could command. 1397–8 was, in the words of one of the officersof the earl of Warwick, such ‘an year of tribulation’. One of its victims wasThomas Mowbray, recently promoted duke of Norfolk (d. 1399). Now a victimof Richard II’s spleen, he was driven into exile. He took the sensible step ofappointing eight of his confidants—including his brother-in-law (Sir ThomasGuy of Heton), two other knights, and two clerks—to be his ‘entire and con-tinuous council’ during his absence. But it is what happened on a quayside inSuffolk on 19 October 1398 which most vividly illustrates the drawing power oflordship. The duke boarded ship with thirty attendants, bound for exile. On thequayside 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 theoccasion might have been; but it was also—as with the crowds which turnedup to welcome the young Roger Mortimer, earl of March, on his return fromIreland in spring 1398—a demonstration that personal lordship had the capacityto attract fierce and public support even in the most dangerous political times.

If departure for exile was so publicly choreographed, funerals were evenmore carefully planned and staged. Magnates often left very precise and detailedarrangements for their interment in their wills. There was often a substantial delaybetween death and interment, when the body would be embalmed and all theother arrangements—including clothing the household servants in black—wereput in place. The Black Prince died on 8 June 1376, but his interment atCanterbury did not take place until 29 September. John of Gaunt specificallystipulated that he should not be buried until forty days after his death.⁴⁰ Thedeceased 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 churchof 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 ‘anarch near the high altar beside a window which he had caused to be built’. Thechoice of the place of burial was determined not only by family affection andpersonal choice but also by a deep sense of loyalty and indebtedness. The caseof Sir William Beauchamp (d. 1411) is particularly striking in this respect. Hechose not to be buried with his own family but in the Dominican church atHereford ‘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.


The explanation is not far to seek: when the last Hastings earl of Pembroke diedin a sporting accident in 1389, William Beauchamp succeeded to many of hislands (including the large Marcher lordship of Abergavenny, hence his title ‘ofBergavenny’) by the terms of an enfeoffment made by Hastings’s father. Nowby choosing to be buried next to Hastings, William Beauchamp—a fourth son,an Oxford graduate, and a former canon of Salisbury—was acknowledging indeath whence his landed fortunes were derived.

Widows might likewise use the choice of burial place to indicate in death wheretheir true affections lay, whatever may have been their conventional obligationsin life. So it was, for example, that Philippa, countess of March (d. 1382),opted out of the Mortimer family mausoleum at Wigmore abbey and askedto be buried, instead, ‘in the second arch of the altar of St Anne’s’ at Bishamabbey, opposite her father the earl of Salisbury (d. 1344). Countess Philippacould assert her independence since she had outlived her husband by over twentyyears. Had she predeceased him, then she might well find that her husband’swishes—prompted no doubt by genuine affection—reached beyond her grave.So it was that Richard, earl of Arundel (d. 1397), left instructions that the bodyof his first wife (Elizabeth, daughter of William Bohun, earl of Northampton)should be conveyed from her present tomb to his own burial spot in Lewespriory, to be united in death as they had once been in life.⁴²

Funerals were, by definition, expensive affairs. They were, after all, occasionsnot only to express sorrow but also to display power and status—in the almsdistributed, 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 expensesof his funeral and commanded that the tombs of his father, mother, and wifebe hung with cloth as rich as his own.⁴³ John of Gaunt—admittedly far andaway the richest magnate in England—spent £600 on the burial costs of hissecond wife, Duchess Constance.⁴⁴ In the case of the funeral of Thomas, dukeof Clarence, who was killed at the battle of Bauge on 22 March 1421, we areprivileged to have a detailed account of the expenses. They amounted to £136,including livery for eighty men carrying torches around his body; and doubtlessthere are other expenses which are not included.⁴⁵

Funerals were an occasion to parade noble status and opulence to maximumeffect. 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 faras 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 hisEffects, A.D. 1319–1322’, Archaeological Journal, 2 (1846), 339–49.

⁴⁴ Walker, Lancastrian Affinity, 94. ⁴⁵ Household Accounts, II, 679–82.


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 thesame design, and that each of those who carries the said banners shall have on his head ahat bearing our arms.

And so he continues in the same vein. As it happens, many of the Prince’saccoutrements—his ‘achievements’ as they were called—which were carriedinto 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 beremembered in death.⁴⁶

Not all magnates paraded their status and prowess so ostentatiously as didthe Black Prince. Yet no one would have doubted that this was a proper wayof displaying his status in society. The earl of Surrey/Warenne (d. 1347) hadlikewise commanded that four of his great horses dressed with his arms shouldbe led before his body on the day of his interment. Perhaps more surprising is itto note that among the stoutest defenders of grand funerals for the aristocracywere some of the longest-lived and hard-headed widows of medieval England.The thrice-widowed Elizabeth de Burgh (d. 1360), who had outlived her thirdand 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 fordisbursements on the eve and day of burial. Equally impressive must have beenthe funeral rites of Elizabeth, countess of Salisbury (d. 1415): the costs arenot itemized (beyond a long list of charitable bequests) but the spectacle oftwenty-four poor men in gowns and hoods of russet carrying torches as thebody was borne into Bisham priory on a ‘herse’ covered with black cloth andfive great candles (each weighing twenty pounds) must have been impressive.Unsurprisingly, perhaps the greatest stickler for appropriate recognition to bemade of her elevated social status comes in the statement made by the formidableJoan Beauchamp (d. 1435), daughter of the earl of Arundel and widow of thelord of Abergavenny. She made it unambiguously clear that she was ‘to be carriedto the place of my burying . . . with all the worship that ought to be done to awoman of my estate’ (my italics). A thousand marks was set aside for the costs ofthe 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 thedeep doubts that entered into the aristocratic mentality in the fourteenth centuryabout the pomp and expense of funeral ceremonies. In an age of the increasinginternalization of religious devotion and of personal religious practices andself-analysis, an extravagant display of social standing in lavish funerals seemedout 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.


Joan Beauchamp prefaced her will with a preamble which spoke of her simpleand wretched body and of this wretched and unstable life on earth. Otherswent 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 toLondon secretly (tout privement), no meal to be prepared on the day of thefuneral except for a bishop, friars, and his household servants (mesnie). Secularextravagance was banned; but this was counterbalanced by spiritual welfare forthe soul of the deceased: fifty friars were to pray for his soul for a year. EarlHumphrey was exceptional in his self-proclaimed abstinence; but the practiceof avoiding grand interments and of making protestations about the vanity ofworldly glory became fashionable among the later medieval aristocracy.⁴⁸ Therewas no greater warrior than Duke Henry of Lancaster (d. 1361) and no greaterlover of the delights of the sporting and military life (as his analogies in his LeLivre de Seyntz Medecines vividly show); but he specifically commanded that thereshould be no extravagance—such as men-at-arms or caparisoned horses—at hisfuneral. Many other noblemen—including Edmund Mortimer, earl of March(d. 1381), whose executors were commanded not to make ‘great and outrageouscosts’ at his interment; or Earl Richard Fitzalan of Arundel (d. 1397), whoprohibited men-at-arms, horses, or any extravagance at his funeral and cappedthe funeral expenses at a thousand marks; or John of Gaunt (d. 1399) wholikewise stipulated that no solemnity or feast should be associated with hisburial—followed suit. The tension between the appropriate display of status andthe spiritual introspection which begat self-abasement is a recurrent feature ofthe mental world of the late medieval aristocracy.

Funeral costs were not, of course, confined to interment rituals; they would begreatly augmented by the construction of a monument or effigy to the deceased.Wills generally stipulated the church in which the deceased should be buriedand often the precise spot within the church; they might also indicate the kindof memorial to be erected. Family traditions were often so strong that theindividual had very little choice in the matter.⁴⁹ At least fourteen members of theMortimer family—and doubtless their spouses also—were buried at Wigmoreabbey 1185–1398 (even if, as in the case of Roger Mortimer the first earl ofMarch (d. 1330), they had initially been buried elsewhere). Likewise the deVere family—earls of Oxford and one of the most exceptionally long-survivingcomital 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. Pearland B. Worden (London, 1981), 43–55.

⁴⁹ See in general B. and M. Gittos, ‘Motivation and Choice: The Selection of Medieval SecularEffigies’, in Heraldry, Pageantry and Social Display in Medieval England, ed. P. Coss and M. Keen(Woodbridge, 2003), 143–69.


(Essex) where fourteen of its effigies were extant. Where a family tradition didnot exist, it could be created so that the family’s continuity through time couldbe made manifest in its effigies. So it was that Hugh Despenser (d. 1349) setabout to reshape the eastern arm of the abbey church at Tewkesbury with a grandmausoleum for his family. Individual magnates not infrequently gave directionsas to the kind of monument which should be erected in their memory. JohnHastings, earl of Pembroke (d. 1375) instructed that his tomb ‘be made as likeas 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 secondhusband of Margaret, the Countess Marshal), commissioned ‘an alabaster tomblike the one for Sir John Beauchamp in St Paul’s’. Other nobles avoided thepath of emulation and instead gave precise instructions regarding their funerarymonuments. Sir John Montagu, the brother of the earl of Salisbury, directed thathis tomb should have an image of a knight bearing the arms of Montagu, witha helmet beneath his head. More remarkable was the very precise descriptionwhich Isabel, countess of Warwick (d. 1439) prepared of ‘my statue . . . all naked,with my hair cast backwards, according to the design and model which ThomasPorchalion has for that purpose’.⁵⁰

Such monuments did not come cheap; they were an extra charge whichheirs and executors had to bear in mind. John of Gaunt may have been in asuper-league in terms of wealth; but the costs he incurred in erecting a worthytomb 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 tombat St Paul’s: Henry Yevele, the great master mason who designed some of themost lavish tombs and buildings for English kings and aristocrats in the latefourteenth century, was paid £486 for the construction of the tomb itself.⁵¹Sometimes the tomb was topped with a brass memorial, indicating how the tastefor brasses—so favoured by the English knightly and mercantile classes in theperiod—had also captured the imagination of the aristocracy. Nowhere is thismore obvious than in the splendid brass on the Purbeck marble tomb of Eleanor,duchess of Gloucester (d. 1399), at Westminster abbey. Monumental sculpturefor the English aristocracy was to reach its apogee in the resplendent gilt-bronzeeffigy 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 chapelconstructed for the purpose at St Mary’s church, Warwick. This is a reminderto 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.


recurrently manifested in acts which commemorated their lives and their wishes.Anniversaries were scrupulously and lavishly celebrated. Thus John of Gauntheld a great feast on the anniversary of Duchess Blanche’s death, attended bymagnates and the chapter of St Paul’s. Twenty-four poor tenants perambulatedround her tomb holding a burning torch each, and alms were distributed to thecanons of St Paul’s, the poor and the prisoners of Newgate, Ludgate, and theFleet.⁵³ Nor were these arrangements in any way exceptional. The distribution ofalms in accordance with the testator’s will was a primary call on executors. Thebequests made by the redoubtable Joan Beauchamp, lady of Abergavenny, maystand for scores of similar examples: one hundred marks for the poor attendingher funeral; two hundred marks to be divided among poor tenants; £100 forclothing, bedding, horses, oxen, and other necessaries within six months of herdeath 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 bridgesand foul ways; and £40 for the deliverance of poor prisoners. The grand totalof Lady Joan’s bequests of this kind amounted to £520. It was not a punitivesum given that the landed valuation of her English estates amounted to morethan £2,000 annually to which should be added £500 or so for the Marcherlordship of Abergavenny. But she no doubt regarded it as charitable givingat 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 amuch more substantial and long-term drain on noble finances were the variousreligious bequests which the aristocracy made to ease their passage into thenext world.⁵⁵ Prayers for the dead (and sometimes for members of his or herfamily) headed the list. The pious earl of Hereford (d. 1361) was perhaps onthe extravagant side in instructing fifty friars to pray for his soul for a yearafter his death; but others—such as the countess of Salisbury (d. 1415)—whointer 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 religiousbequests which were, as it were, sine die. Richard Fitzalan, earl of Arundel, couldafford to be particularly prodigal given his immense personal wealth. So it wasthat he instructed that two monks of Lewes priory should celebrate two massesperpetually. He also established a college of six priests and three choristers tocelebrate divine service annually in the chapel of Arundel castle. Religious housesand churches on the lord’s estates were showered with donations: EdmundMortimer, 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 (Lon-

don, 1972).⁵⁶ Reg. Chichele, II, 14–15.


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 forsome minor houses. If to such bequests we add the costs of the foundation andmaintenance of chantries and colleges (of which perhaps the most remarkablewas the college and hospital of St Mary Newarke at Leicester, founded by DukeHenry of Lancaster), the distribution of alms, the arrangements for anniversaries,we begin to realize what a huge drain death and the hereafter were on aristocraticfinances. And also on aristocratic consciences: Richard, earl of Arundel (d. 1397),was clearly haunted by the conviction that he had not fully observed the termsof his father’s will and that his own son in turn might be likewise cavalier inobserving his own testament. The detailed care and attention that the aristocracygave to the composition and terms of their wills—often the nearest we get toa personal insight into their characters—make it clear that proper preparationand down-payments for the hereafter were not only genuine acts of personalpiety but were also the obligatory discharge of the social expectations of theirexalted position in life. There is little in the essence of aristocratic testamentarydirections which distinguishes them from the wills of ordinary believers; but thescale of largesse and calculated transfer of wealth which they incorporate indicatethat in commemoration and memorialization, as in all other respects, the greateraristocracy stood apart.

Most of the acts and rituals of display and magnificence outlined above wereself-referential, in that their purpose was to display and confirm the exalted statusof the greater aristocracy. They were part of the self-affirmation of its socialpre-eminence. But ultimately in the social theory and assumptions of the periodthe justification of lordship lay in the role it played in relation to the social fabricand to the orders of society in general. Lordship was in the final analysis—likekingship—more than power, more than exploitation, albeit that these are thefacets of it which were often brutally to the fore and which can be documentedin terms amenable to modern economic and social analysis. Lordship was alsoa ministerium, an office. That is why contemporaries talked frequently of ‘goodlordship’, which could clearly be distinguished from the mere exercise of power,just as kingship could be distinguished from tyranny. To such issues we willreturn.⁵⁷ We touch upon them here because it was the duty of good lordship todisplay itself not only to its peers but also to those who were within the orbit ofits dependence and social responsibility.

We have already seen that, though the primary calls on the lord’s conscienceas death approached was to ease his own passage in the hereafter, and thereafterto discharge his debts and to reward his servants and followers, high priority wasalso 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 thisbook.’


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 thelordships I have’. This was the visible discharge of the obligations of lordship onthe lord’s own lands and to his own tenants and dependants. It is a reminder tous that medieval lordship was ultimately personal and patriarchal. So it was thatWilliam Montagu, earl of Salisbury (d. 1397), in a will made ten years beforehis death, made bequests to poor tenants of twenty-one of his English manorsand ‘all tenants, English and Welsh, of my lordship of Mold’.⁵⁸ Nor should webe necessarily unduly cynical about such gifts: there was a mutuality about therelationship of lord and tenant which, at its best, was recognized by both partiesin terms of the social order. Thus the charity that the earl of Salisbury showedto 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 iswhy Alice, duchess of Suffolk (d. 1475) gave money to build a new bell-towerat the church of Eye so that ‘there should be a perpetual memorial among thetenants 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 manypurposes, a personal bond, the public affirmation of that bond should bethe initial act of lordship. Such affirmation was the purpose of the twin actsof homage and fealty, the one a physical obeisance to the lord, the othera pledge on oath to accept him as lord and all that followed from suchacceptance. The formulae for both ceremonies were solemnly copied intoseigniorial archives, and the lord’s officers sought to ensure that tenants anddependants did not overlook their obligation to perform them. By the fourteenthcentury both homage and fealty had largely become formal adjuncts of tenure,performed at the moment of entry into a tenement or holding. But lordsdid not overlook the theatricality of the occasion as a way of expressing theirrights as lord. So it was that the Black Prince ordered all who were boundto do homage and fealty to him to come to London to do so; the gentryof Cornwall turned up at Restormel castle to discharge their homage andfealty; 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 alltenants in arrears with their homage and fealty should be distrained.⁶⁰ No doubtconsiderations of control and profit—such as fines for the non-performanceof suit of court—dictated such exercises; but we should not underestimate theemphasis 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.


This becomes abundantly clear if we take note of the great collective actsof acknowledgement of lordship, especially new lordship, which figure in therecords. They are yet another reminder to us how close the parallels were betweenkingship and lordship in this, as in many other respects. Just as a new kinghad to be acclaimed popularly at his inauguration or just as Edward I hadinsisted that hundreds of Scots swear fealty to him—and such fealties wererecorded in the thirty-five membranes of parchment in the Ragman Rolls—in1296, so lords inaugurated their lordship by securing massive declarations offealty, either in person or by proxy. So it was—to cite only a couple ofinstances—that in 1284 twenty-nine leading men of the lordship of Bromfieldand Yale (north-east Wales) did homage to the son of the earl of Surrey (thenew lord of the lordship), followed by a communal act of homage by the restof the tenants ‘with hands raised and joined unanimously’; and so it was inDecember 1404 outside the walls of Kildrummy castle that the free tenants ofthe earldom of Mar accepted Alexander Stewart as their new earl.⁶¹ Whenevera lordship changed hands—through death, transfer, or political forfeiture—itwas imperative that the authority of the new lord be publicly acknowledged.Two thousand Welshmen were said to have attended such a ceremony in Breconin 1302, and likewise when Roger Mortimer of Wigmore seized the Fitzalanlordship of Clun in 1321 he immediately took the fealty and homage of its men.⁶²Such ceremonies had practical consequences: men who had sworn fealty werejusticiable by him and answerable to him—as the words of the formula expressedit—‘in life and members and earthly honour’. But above all they remind us thatthere was a patriarchal and personal dimension to medieval lordship—especiallyin areas outside the claustrophobic reach of royal power—which we ignore atour peril.

Since lordship was personal it was important that it be personally displayed,especially at its inauguration. Medieval aristocrats spent most of their owntime attending to their own pleasures and responsibilities; but few of themoverlooked 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 visithis manors in East Anglia and then undertook a forty-day progress throughhis estates in Wales and the March.⁶³ He was in effect showing himself to hissubjects; they for their part were expected to ‘acknowledge his lordship overthem’ (in the contemporary phrase) and to show their delight by granting himhandsome 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).


1397 to remind its people who their lord was and that he had recently beenpromoted 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 Herefordto his lordship of Brecon in 1397 epitomizes the twin faces of aristocraticlordship—patriarchal and acquisitive, ostentatious and extortionate. Keepingsome degree of acceptable balance between these twin faces was one of themost delicate demands of lordship. It was so at all times, but the balance wasparticularly difficult in the harsh economic and social conditions of the laterMiddle Ages, as population fell catastrophically and as many of the mechanismsof seigniorial control and exploitation were challenged or bypassed. For the mostpart the centrality of lordship—be it that of the lord of the manor or that ofthe great lay and ecclesiastical magnate—as a cornerstone, for good or ill, of thesocial order was not effectively called in question. And so long as lordship wascentral, so would also be the display and magnificence which were the visualdemonstration of its status, power, and apartness. In a profoundly hierarchicalsocial order, it could hardly be otherwise.


For the role of the crown in aristocratic display, H. Collins, The Order of theGarter, 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 Importsto England in the Fourteenth Century’, in War, Government and Aristocracy in theBritish Isles c.1150–1500: Essays in Honour of Michael Prestwich, ed. C. Given-Wilson, A. Kettle, and L. Scales (Woodbridge, 2008). For aristocratic diet,C. M. Woolgar, ‘Fast and Feast: Conspicuous Consumption and the Diet ofthe Nobility in the Fifteenth Century’, in The Fifteenth Century II: Revolutionand 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 thesplendour 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).


in North-West Europe, 1270–1380 (Oxford, 2001), and C. M. Woolgar, TheSenses in Late Medieval England (New Haven, 2006), chs. 10 and 11.

For aristocratic display in death, D. M. Hadley, Death in Medieval England: AnArchaeology (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: Architectureand Furnishings (Stroud, 2002), ch. 4. For funerary monuments in EnglishIreland, S. Fry, Burial in Medieval Ireland, 900–1500 (Dublin, 1999), ch. 5and R. Moss, ‘Permanent Expressions of Piety: The Secular and the Sacredin Later Medieval Stone Sculpture’, in Art and Devotion in Late MedievalIreland, ed. R. Moss, C. O Clabaigh, and S. Ryan (Dublin, 2006). Forrepresentations of Gaelic lordship, F. Verstraten, ‘Images of Gaelic Lordship inIreland, c.1200–c.1400’, in Lordship in Medieval Ireland: Image and Reality, ed.L. Doran and J. Lyttleton (Dublin, 2008).

3The 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 naturalresources (including forest, pastureland, waste, and waters) of their estates. Theywere domini terrae. The countryside likewise was the venue for their pastimesand leisure, notably for the hunting and the falconry to which they were almostall addicted. It is true, of course, that active and able-bodied male lords wouldspend a great deal of time away from their landed estate—on military campaignsand diplomatic missions, on a social round of tournaments and celebrations,or attending court, council, or parliament. But it was to their residences in thecountryside that they regularly returned; and it was on these residences that theylavished much of their wealth. This was their natural habitat.

They were spoilt for choice, or at least potentially so. The landed fortunesof the greater aristocracy were often very widely dispersed geographically;particularly was this true of the greater English aristocracy. This meant that theresidences of the aristocracy—be they castles, manor-houses, hunting lodges,country mansions, or (particularly in late medieval Scotland and Ireland) tower-houses—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 inEngland and Wales.¹ Not all castles and manor-houses were kept in an adequatestate of repair or comfort to offer acceptable accommodation to a great lord andhis menage. Even so, since it was one of the expectations of effective lordshipthat the lord should show himself periodically in his ‘country’, a goodly numberof the lord’s residences had to be kept in at least a minimum state of goodrepair 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 anyother English lord. He was particularly fond, when in England, of extended staysat his palace of Savoy near London or his castle of Hertford (which was greatlyupgraded for his personal comfort); a man of his eminence, after all, needed to bewithin earshot of the royal court and its pulsating social and political life. But hedid not ignore his midland and northern residences: Higham Ferrers, Leicester,

¹ Fowler, King’s Lieutenant, 172.

The Lord at Home 83

Kenilworth, Tutbury, Tickhill, Knaresborough, Pontefract, and Pickering wereall castles which he visited with some regularity.²

In spite of being spoilt for choice, there were compelling reasons why greatlords concentrated their extended stays at a few favoured residences. Individualpreferences and circumstances no doubt played their part. The reason why EarlThomas of Lancaster (d. 1322) spent most of the period 1317–22 based atPontefract was doubtless explained by his growing political disenchantment andhis anxiety to establish a regional power base for himself in dangerous times.³His 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 prayfor the Lancastrian dynasty; but it may well be that the prime attraction ofthe area for him lay in the proximity of excellent hunting in nearby Leicesterforest. His spiritual memoirs make it abundantly clear that rural sports were anabiding passion for him.⁴ A family’s favoured residence might indeed changeover time as it acquired new estates through marriage and inheritance. Wigmore(Herefordshire) had been the base for the Mortimers since they arrived in Englandsoon after the Norman conquest; but by the early fourteenth century its days ofglory were already past and it was dismissed in a survey as a place ‘more of honourthan of profit’.⁵ The Mortimers waxed rich as they acquired first the Genevilleinheritance and then the vast estates of Elizabeth de Burgh (d. 1360). Two of thepremier castles of these two acquisitions—Ludlow and Usk respectively—nowbecame favourite residences of the Mortimers, as is suggested by the recordedbirthplaces of their children;⁶ both were extensively refurbished in the fourteenthcentury to make them comfortable seigniorial homes.

Seigniorial residences were much more complex buildings than the gauntruins of most medieval castles would suggest today. Two of the very contrastingresidences occasionally used by Roger Bigod, earl of Norfolk (d. 1306), mayserve to make the point. In spring 1273 Earl Roger and his wife spent nineweeks in the manor-house at Forncett (Norfolk). They would have foundthe accommodation there more than adequate, ‘almost palatial’. The centralhall—where public entertainment would be staged—was flanked by up totwelve chambers (including the earl’s chamber and the knights’ chamber). Therewere 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.


manor with a full-time labour force of eight or nine servants. It was a convenientstopping place on the travels of the servants, knights, officials, and huntsmen ofthe earl.⁷

Forncett may have been adequate; but it paled in grandeur compared withsome of Earl Roger’s other residences. The late thirteenth century was a greatage for highly ambitious seigniorial building; Earl Roger of Norfolk was oneof its great exponents. He made extensive alterations and extensions at his twoSuffolk castles at Framlingham and Bungay; constructed splendid manor-housesat Walton (Suffolk) and Hamstead Marshall (Berkshire); and erected a huntinglodge 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 Gothicchurch at Tintern abbey in the Wye valley. But his most sumptuous, and for usmost significant, achievement was the redesigning and rebuilding of the lowerbailey of Chepstow castle.⁸ The work appears to have been undertaken underthe direction of a London master mason, Ralph Gogan. The refurbished castleredounded to the greater glory and comfort of Earl Roger. A splendid suite ofprivate apartments—housing a hall, cellar, earl’s chamber, kitchen, and servicerooms—was constructed overlooking the river Wye; a new, lavishly appointedand self-contained set of apartments was built in the new (or Marten’s) towerin the south-east corner; and the great tower (whose origins date back to a fewyears after the Norman conquest) was extended and embellished. The imperativebehind this extravagant building enterprise was not strictly military (since theWelsh had ceased to be a threat in this extreme south-east corner of Wales); ratherwas it display and magnificence. Chepstow was almost certainly Earl Roger’sfavourite residence; here he could flex his seigniorial muscles to their full extentsince Chepstow lay, at least administratively and judicially, beyond the reach ofthe machinery of English royal government but within the social and economicorbit of English seigniorial life.

Earl Roger sank a large fortune into the rebuilding and redesigning ofChepstow. He was not unusual in this respect. The primary call on theseigniorial budget was money to feed and clothe the lord and his household; thatwas 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’scastles) 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 ofGaunt 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 isR. 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.

The Lord at Home 85

and comfortable. Kenilworth was a particular favourite of his. He assigned at least400 marks annually in the 1380s to construct ‘a new palace complex’ there whosecentrepiece was a magnificent unaisled great hall, 90 × 45 feet in dimensions,and covered with a huge hammer-beam roof. The outer buildings of the castlecould accommodate up to 200 servants and retainers.¹⁰ Here Gaunt could holdcourt in a style worthy of a man who was titular king of Castile as well asduke of Lancaster. Other earls followed suit, albeit on a more modest scale. TheBeauchamp earls of Warwick spent regularly and lavishly especially on Warwickcastle; the Fitzalan earls of Arundel did the same at the castles of Shrawardine andArundel, the headquarters respectively of their Shropshire and Sussex estates; sodid Thomas, duke of Gloucester, on Pleshey (Essex) and Caldicot on the Severnestuary which came to him as part of his wife’s inheritance.¹¹ Nor did the greatestof the Scottish magnates lag far behind, though the idiom of building and thefunction of the castle were in some respects different in a Scottish context. It wasthe first earl of Douglas (d. 1384) who was probably responsible for rebuildingthe splendid castle of Tantallon (East Lothian) with its curtain walls and towersperched high above the sea. The third earl, Archibald the Grim (d. 1400) chosea very different design when he opted for a free-standing, massive, rectangulartower-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 buildan 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-foundwealth and status by building castles at Stafford and Madeley (Gloucestershire).¹²Equally striking are the building enterprises of the two northern families, Percyand Neville, who both climbed into the comital league in the later fourteenthcentury (in 1377 and 1397 respectively). Warkworth castle had come intothe hands of the Percy family in 1332 but it was in the closing decades ofthe fourteenth century that the first Percy earl of Northumberland (d. 1408)redesigned it into the remarkable edifice whose splendid outline still survivestoday. Its interlocking site of over twenty rooms, its semi-polygonal projectingtowers, and the splendid symmetry of the whole design proclaimed to the worldthat the Percies had arrived—indeed the family’s lion rampant on the walls of itsnorthern salient made that point visually—and that they could build as grandlyand innovatively as any of their peers in midland and southern England.¹³ HenryPercy had even planned a collegiate church within the precincts of his refurbishedcastle—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 LancastrianAffinity, 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, 56n. 71 (Shrawardine); 75 n. 32 (Caldicot).

¹² McFarlane, Nobility, 203. ¹³ Age of Chivalry, 247–8.


grandest English families, such as the houses of Lancaster and Arundel. Norwere the Nevilles, the neighbours and rivals of the Percies in the north, to beoutdone. 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 SheriffHutton so that, in John Leland’s words, ‘no house in the north [was] so like aprincely lodging.’¹⁴ Many other families of baronial and comital rank followedsuit, for the castle was still in the later Middle Ages the status symbol parexcellence 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 northof England, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland. Even in lowland England the castlecould still play its role in an act of military defiance: so it was that the earl ofArundel fortified Reigate castle (Surrey) when he faced arrest at the hands ofRichard II in the tense autumn months of 1387.¹⁵ In more normal conditions thecastle continued to perform both a psychological and practical role as the visualexpression of seigniorial domination and power. Psychologically it expressed theawesomeness of lordship. That is why, for example, John of Gaunt built a massivenew 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 avisible reminder of who was lord of the district. It was, in the words of a nearcontemporary Welsh poem about another Welsh castle, ‘the tower of the boldconqueror’. Practically Kidwelly—in common with many other castles—wasthe fulcrum of the lord’s authority and governance of the district. It was the seatof the lord’s major local officials, his steward and receiver; his auditors and otherofficials visited it regularly on their investigative circuits; it was to its treasurythat the tenantry and local officials of an extensive area paid their dues; and itwas 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 MiddleAges was to provide acceptable accommodation for the lord and his retinueon their extended visits. The emphasis was increasingly on domestic comfortand privacy. Hence the addition of withdrawing rooms and private apartments,glazed windows and chimneyed hearths. Castles such as Kenilworth—whichnow boasted a room called ‘le parlour’—increasingly resembled the countryhouse of the future rather than the military fortress of the past. Nor shouldwe underestimate the role of seigniorial wives and dowagers in promoting

¹⁴ The territorial fortunes and activities of the Percy and Neville families are discussed, andmapped, in C. Given-Wilson, The English Nobility in the Late Middle Ages: The Fourteenth-CenturyPolitical 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 (Oxford, 1995), 15–16, 269–72.

The Lord at Home 87

such changes. Richard, earl of Arundel (d. 1397), renamed Shrawardine castle(Shropshire) Castle Philippa in honour of his wife, Philippa Mortimer, anddoubtless transformed it to suit her tastes and needs. Earl Richard’s uxoriousnesswas 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 stoneblocks with his own name and that of Eleanor, his wife (through whom hehad inherited the castle and estate) into the masonry of the new tower. Evenhardbitten dowagers had to keep up with the latest fashion: Joan Beauchamp,lady of Abergavenny (d. 1435) had a minstrels’ gallery, a green chamber, anda parlour installed in her residence at Rochford (Essex) and commissioned apainter from London to paint the wooden buttresses of her great hall ‘in thecolour of marble’.¹⁷

Lady Joan’s home at Rochford boasted at least two named gardens—the greatgarden and the west garden. In this respect also she was following seigniorialfashion: John of Gaunt certainly had a garden at Kenilworth (one of hisfavourite country residences) and at his palace at Savoy; the earl of Warwickhad a garden and a vineyard at Warwick.¹⁸ Castles—or at least those that wereregularly favoured as residences and accordingly refurbished and upgraded—werebecoming relatively comfortable and well-appointed residences rather than thegaunt and bare ruins that are normally all that survives of them today. Some of theleading architects, master masons and master carpenters were hired to reconstructand repair them—including Henry Yevele and William of Wintringham in theservice of John of Gaunt. Such experienced professionals set their stamp onsome 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 castlebuilding (John of Gaunt, the Nevilles, the Percies, and the Scropes were amonghis clients) in northern England in the late fourteenth century. But the impetus,and even occasionally the exact specifications, came from the lord himself orfrom his council. John of Gaunt gave clear instructions to John Lewyn for thework he was to undertake on the great tower at Dunstanburgh and, even moreprecisely, 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 besited’. Such detailed personal attention to the planning and execution of castlerefurbishment should not surprise us.¹⁹

The great lords lived in the countryside, but they had to come to townregularly. Particularly was this true of the English higher aristocracy; the rhythmsand 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.


a foothold—be it a permanent residence or a rented inn or hostel or lodgingsat a religious house—in London.²⁰ Westminster was now the focal pointof the country’s political and governmental life; it was there that councils andparliaments met, and that the kingdom’s judicial, secretarial, and financial serviceswere concentrated. In a king-centred polity such as England, no magnate couldafford not to have a periodic presence—either in person or through his officersor attorneys—at Westminster. But London was inescapable for other reasonsalso. It being the richest and most populous city in England its leading merchantswere in a league of their own in providing the goods, especially the luxurygoods—the silverware, jewels, furs, expensive cloths—which were the hallmarksof aristocratic life. The great lay lords must have ranked among the most valuablecustomers of London merchant oligarchs. Even the most country-dwellingmagnate needed a base—be it only a wardrobe—in London where purchasedgoods could be deposited before onward transit to the lord’s household. That iswhy the great wardrobe—the reserve stockroom in effect—of most aristocratswas located in London, to be close to its suppliers.

The nexus of relationships which bound the greater aristocracy to the merchantoligarchy of London was complex and mutual, extending to credit facilities as wellas 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 £115owed to John Clee, draper, £217 to John Wodecock, mercer, and £203 to RobertMakeley, skinner. Bolingbroke owed his creditors on this account alone £825.²¹He was living beyond his means and his debts would have been significant werehe 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 wehave records had a London address. This was even true of a northern family suchas 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 atYork).²² Many other noble families—including Valence, Mortimer, Mowbray,Fitzalan, and Stafford—followed suit. So did dowagers and heirs: Elizabeth deBurgh, lady of Clare (d. 1360), spent £172 in 1352 on building a Londonhouse 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 Londonlodgings at Bishopsgate.²³ Other magnates preferred to rent accommodationin the city from religious houses: Thomas of Woodstock, duke of Gloucester(d. 1397), stayed at the house of the Minoresses outside Aldgate and it wasthere that his wife died in 1400. Nor was such rented accommodation spartanor 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 TownHouse 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).

The Lord at Home 89

on his arrest in July 1397—including splendid tapestries, sumptuous beds andtesters, cushions and curtains, plates, saucers, and cutlery bearing the duke’sarms, an organ, a chess set, and two chariots—vividly demonstrates.²⁴ Thomasof Woodstock lived well in London; but his lodgings did not compare insize 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 ofLancaster (d. 1361), had built at vast expense—the sum of £35,000 was thecontemporary estimate—from 1349 onwards, allegedly out of the profits ofhis military campaigns in Aquitaine. Contemporary chroniclers were awestruckby its opulence: ‘no prince in Christendom had a finer wardrobe and scarcelyany could even match it. . . . There were such quantities of vessels and silverplate . . . that five carts could hardly suffice to carry them.’²⁵ It is no wonder thatsuch brazen opulence became the target of the rebels’ destructive fury in June1381. So devastated was Gaunt by the destruction of the Savoy and the pillagingof its contents that he did not rebuild it; hereafter he preferred to lease the bishopof Ely’s house in Holborn or made use of Westminster abbey’s manor of LaNeyte when he stayed in London.

Toing and froing between their country residences and their London lodgingswas but one aspect—albeit possibly the most important—of the itineratinghabits of the greater aristocracy. It may well be (as several historians haveclaimed) that the aristocracy was less restlessly itinerant by the fourteenth andfifteenth centuries than it had been previously; it is certainly true that lay magnateswere far less itinerant in their habits than were many ecclesiastics for whom wehave records (such as Richard Swinfield bishop of Hereford 1283–1317 andWalter de Wenlok, abbot of Westminster 1283–1307).²⁶ In general it appearsthat magnates stayed for much longer periods at a few selected residences (as Johnof Gaunt did at the Savoy, Hertford, and Kenilworth), paying only short visits totheir other outposts. None of this should surprise us. The standards of domesticcomfort and privacy expected by greater magnates were rising steadily and couldonly be adequately met by a few of their residences. Furthermore the logisticalproblems of moving a lord and his retinue of servants and followers from placeto place were formidable: the main furnishings of hall, chapel, chamber, andservice rooms had to be transported; stabling and fodder for a hundred or morehorses and palfreys had to be arranged; supplies of food and drink had either tobe carried in carts or bought in advance by agents at local markets and from localmerchants; boats had to be commandeered for river or estuary crossings (thoughthe greatest lords, such as John of Gaunt and Henry Bolingbroke, had their ownbarges and teams of bargemen, dressed in their lord’s livery); and guides had tobe 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.


The disincentives to travel were indeed very substantial and are very vividlyillustrated for us by the complexity and cumbersomeness of some of thearistocratic journeys for which we have detailed accounts. Such was the journeyundertaken by Edward, duke of York (d. 1415), from Cardiff castle to Hanley(Worcestershire) in October 1409: it entailed travel both by land (throughNewport, Monmouth, Ross-on-Wye, and Ledbury) and by water (via Bristol andGloucester); 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 thelarder at Hanley; and the transport of 33 loads of material from the banks of theSevern to Hanley castle itself.²⁸ It was a complex operation; but it was part ofthe cursus of the life of a great lord. The imperatives for itineration still remainedpressing. Sometimes it was public service which was the incentive: to attendparliament or the court, to prepare for a military operation, or to travel on adiplomatic errand (as did the earl of March in May–June 1378 as he travelledacross England to conduct negotiations with the Scots at the border).²⁹ Thesocial round of the aristocratic calendar was also an incentive to travel, be it toa christening, a wedding, or a funeral, on a hunting party or to a tournamentor 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 aformal 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 tookformal control of them in 1393; so likewise Henry Bolingbroke, recently createdduke of Hereford, went on a progress through his great lordships in the Marchof Wales in 1397 and followed it with a great circular tour of his father’s estatesin summer 1398.³⁰

Such progresses were meant to impress and they assuredly did so. Noblehouseholds on the move must have been a familiar sight, especially in midlandand southern England. When Elizabeth de Burgh travelled from Usk (in south-east Wales) to Clare (Suffolk) in 1350 her caravan was composed of 130 horses,twenty-eight hackneys, twenty-two oxen, two esquires, sixty grooms, and nineteenpages. The duchess of Clarence was a grander person and was on a more importantjourney (to join her husband in France) in 1419, so it comes as no surprise thather retinue totalled over 140 (including a dean and twenty-four chaplains).³¹Such retinues trundled their way across the countryside, averaging twelve–twentymiles per day (though greater distances could be covered if necessary). The cartsand sumpter horses of the household offices often proceeded first, preparinglodgings and stabling in advance; the coaches (such as that famously depictedin 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.

The Lord at Home 91

guests followed at a distance. Abbeys and towns might be forewarned of theimpending arrival of the travelling party and might well prepare a grand dinnerand entertainment of minstrels and jesters. If the destination of the journey wasone of the lord’s own lordships, his officers in the locality would be expected toassemble 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 butnot 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 ofkings, princes, and greater ecclesiastics and far removed from that of countyknights.³² Little of the visual splendour of their domestic surroundings andpersonal style has survived until today. We can perhaps best recapture some ofits sumptuousness from idealized iconographic representations (most famouslyin 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 theirresidences). Two sets of such inventories—compiled within weeks of each otherin the wake of a single act of political revenge—will be drawn upon here to try torecapture the domestic ambience of aristocratic living. One is the inventory of theconfiscated goods of Richard Fitzalan, earl of Arundel (d. 1397), at Shrawardinecastle, his favoured residence in Shropshire. (We need to recall that, though hisShropshire and Marcher estates constituted an immensely important power blockfor Fitzalan, his most important residence and, therefore, the most sumptuouslyfurnished home was Arundel castle.) The other inventory is that of the effects ofThomas 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 throughhis marriage to Eleanor Bohun. Pleshey was clearly a very important residencefor Duke Thomas, though he had also a very well-appointed house in Londonand 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 accountedfor 20 per cent of the total value of the duke’s effects at Pleshey, two ofthem alone being estimated as worth £49 and £45 each. The motifs of thetapestries reflect some of the most popular themes of court literature, secularand 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 casecould 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.


Shrawardine list excels is in itemizing the mundane furniture which was essentialin 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 thehalls at Pleshey and Shrawardine must have been cavernously empty, the woodenfurniture stacked, and the wall-hangings unhung and folded away, or even takenwith the lord and his lady as they made their way to their London house orelsewhere. But, clearly, at fairly short notice both halls could be prepared todisplay 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 acoverlet, 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 squarepillows. 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 wereat least sixteen beds, several of them of blue or red silk, as well as an amplestock of cushions, curtains, bolsters, mattresses, and blankets. Beds were highlyprized items of aristocratic property; that is why they figure so prominentlyin aristocratic wills. Earl Richard Fitzalan (d. 1397) bequeathed five carefullydescribed beds in his will to his wife, two of his sons, and two daughters.³⁴ Theywere indeed so prized that they were transported from place to place with thelord: 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 oftenthe only truly comfortable item of furniture in a seigniorial household: it was usednot 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 aristocraticresidence was the chapel. The chapel at Shrawardine was fully equipped with analtar of silk, a table with an alabaster crucifix, an alabaster image of Our Lady, threeportable altars, seven lecterns, and other ecclesiastical equipment. But it was plainand restrained compared with Thomas of Woodstock’s lavishly furnished chapelat Pleshey. The inventory listed seventy-five items in the chapel there, including acope ‘of blue worsted with divers beasts and birds . . . with garters inscribed Honysoit qui mal y pense’ (valued at £60) and another cope of ‘gold of Cyprus workedall over with . . . stories of imagery of the Passion’ (valued at £67). Furthermorethere 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’spossession through his marriage to Eleanor Bohun, for the Bohun family isknown as the owners and sponsors of the most important collection of Englishilluminated manuscripts of the second half of the fourteenth century.

Beyond the major rooms—hall, chamber, chapel—every seigniorial residencewould have a suite of service rooms where stores were kept, food prepared, and

³⁴ Test. Vet., II, 130–1.

The Lord at Home 93

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. Reservestocks for large banquets were kept in a storehouse, where 448 dishes and plattersof wood are recorded in the inventory, as are torches and tapers. The kitchenwas likewise well provided with buckets, frying pans, gridirons, various spitsand knives, salt, a mustard quern, and four salted fallow deer. There was also abakehouse and an ample load of charcoal and thirty cart-loads of brushwood tomeet the heating requirements of the castle. Shrawardine was a modest residence(especially when compared with Pleshey, Arundel, Kenilworth, or Hertford); butit had the wherewithal for the earl of Arundel to live comfortably there on hisoccasional visits and to hold grand feasts when he wished to entertain neighboursand 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 theduke’s London house there was another very valuable collection—twenty-fourgowns in all—which belonged to the Duchess Eleanor. These were the kindof prized robes which also frequently appear in aristocratic wills. They helpedto 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 withfur and embroidered with jewellery. Display and fashion were of the essenceof such ‘power-dressing’. In 1393–4 the dashing young Roger Mortimer, earlof March (d. 1398), ordered one gown to be made for himself for the feast ofSt George and another for a tournament at Christmas. He also commissionednine green hunting gowns to be cut for nine of his close friends. But he reservedhis most extravagant expenditure for a dancing doublet and hanselin (jacket)in white satin and embroidered with whelks, mussels, cockles, and a hundredorange trees. The overall cost of this one item was £24, equivalent to a respectableannual income for a member of the country gentry.³⁵

Inventories and inquisitions help us to get some impression of the furnishingsof aristocratic residences and the sumptuousness of their dress. The growingproliferation of a variety of household accounts, which survive in increasingnumbers from about the mid–late thirteenth century, likewise allows us to meas-ure accurately the consumption of food in itemized detail and the proportionsof different cloths, materials, and utensils purchased for the aristocratic house-hold.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.


and regulations which stipulate, at least formally, the pattern of the day in anaristocratic court, including the periods assigned to religious services, meals, andthe opening and closing of the gates of the household.³⁷ All this adds texture toour understanding of the rhythms of aristocratic life; but stops short of tellingus how great magnates passed their time. Paradoxically, we may well be betterinformed on this score when they were on ‘public’ duty—serving in the armyor 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 anobleman’s domestic life. One such rare glimpse comes to us, indirectly andunintentionally, in the volume of spiritual self-examination which Duke Henryof Lancaster (d. 1361) wrote under the title Le Livre de Seyntz Medecines.³⁸What comes across in the work is the duke’s delight in the sensuous luxuriesof aristocratic life—his fine rings, his garters, his ability as a dancer, his loveof rich food, well-spiced and served with strong sauces, and his passion forwine, ‘for it is a good feeling to be merry’. Duke Henry was one of the richestmen of his day, and one of the great captains and envoys of Edward III’sreign; but his sensitivities were also well attuned to the domestic delights oflife in his many castles and to the thrill of the chase in his favourite forest atLeicester.

Individual magnates no doubt had their individual tastes; but they also shared acommon set of values and outlook. They were bonded into a common aristocraticculture from an early age, often being reared at the house of a great earl or dowagerand being initiated early into the habits and pastimes of chivalric society.³⁹ DukeHenry himself took young knights into his household ‘to be doctrined, learnedand 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 aristocraticculture since at least the twelfth century—whether in the guise of the Latin termmansuetudo or its Anglo-French equivalent gentilesse. They certainly involveda broad-based education by the fourteenth century. Duke Henry specificallyreferred to the ‘school of arms’, and rightly so, since horsemanship and a trainingin arms were essential features of the young aristocratic male’s education from anearly age. But these practical skills were complemented by a solid grounding ingrammar, reading, and increasingly writing.⁴⁰ After all, in later life these youngaristocrats would be the heads of complex business organizations and wouldexpect, and be expected, to keep an overall eye on estate affairs, however muchthey delegated day-to-day business to their councils and officials. Their tutorswere 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.

The Lord at Home 95

religious and moral instruction. Beyond their formal education, they would alsobe initiated directly or indirectly in the behavioural conventions of aristocraticlife—the arts of ‘courtesy’—which would henceforth form the framework oftheir 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 sofor centuries, both in England and on the continent. ‘Greatly did his houndslove him’ was the revealing compliment paid to one early noble devotee of thechase.⁴¹ When they were not represented in full military splendour—as wasthe norm on aristocratic seals and effigies—it was in the guise of hunters thatthe 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, ina 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 dogsin 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 somany magnates: ‘hawkes, hounds and other doggs which all his life had solacedhim’.⁴² Among them would be Henry of Grosmont, duke of Lancaster (d. 1361),whose spiritual meditations have just been cited. His metaphors and images areoften borrowed from the world of the hunt and from the joys of nature—thedigging and smoking out of foxes, the barking of hounds, the song of thenightingale, and the smell of roses and violets. Duke Henry was the epitome ofthe country-loving gentleman as well as a great soldier and diplomat. So was hiseven more famous son-in-law, John of Gaunt. Indeed so personally interestedin the chase was Gaunt that he gave personal instructions when he stayed atPontefract as to where precisely a trench should be dug to best advantage inthe park.⁴³ Hunting and talk of hunting must have filled many an hour inthe aristocrat’s life. After all, in chivalric literature knowledge of the art andvocabulary of venery was a sign of high birth. Gaunt’s nephew, Edward, dukeof York (d. 1415), even went to the trouble of translating the treatise of GastonPhebus, count of Bearn, on the chase into English, under the title The Masterof Game.⁴⁴

Such devotees of the chase spent lavishly on their sport. They kept largepacks of greyhounds, spaniels, mastiffs, and hounds, and spared no expense—asthe wardrobe account of Roger, earl of March (d. 1398), makes clear—in thepurchase 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).


for the lord himself. John of Gaunt had a master of game and rewarded himhandsomely.⁴⁵ Parks were carefully laid out, their fences and palisades regularlyrepaired, and a phalanx of officials paid to police them and to protect thelord’s game jealously. The earl of Norfolk’s parks at Framlingham and Saxteadeventually covered more than a thousand acres and at their peak were homefor 1,600 deer.⁴⁶ Alongside hunting, falconry was a favourite aristocratic sport.John of Gaunt was particularly addicted to it: he bought falcons and hawksat great expense; treasured presents of falcons from foreign dignitaries such asthe duke of Milan and the grand master of the Teutonic Order; and paidhis falconers handsomely.⁴⁷ Gaunt’s purchases and presents may have beenexceptional because of his wealth; but his tastes were those of most of his fellowaristocrats. They shared their enthusiasm together in great hunting parties, suchas the one lasting five days which John of Gaunt arranged in July–August 1390attended by the king, the queen, the archbishop of York, the dukes of York andGloucester, the earls of Arundel and Huntingdon, ‘with other bishops and agreat many lords and ladies’.⁴⁸

Hunting and falconry were physically demanding activities, confined todaytime. Much less demanding of energy were a variety of games to which thearistocracy were partial. The more cerebral of them played chess: Duke Thomasof Gloucester (d. 1397) had a chessboard with its pieces among his effects inhis London lodgings.⁴⁹ Much more common were a variety of dice and cardgames which were a daily indulgence for many aristocrats, just as the lure of thecasino would be irresistible for their successors. Some magnates were inveterategamblers and playboys. Edmund, the last Mortimer earl of March (d. 1425),has a reputation as one such, largely because an account of his gaming losseshas survived.⁵⁰ In the month 13 September–13 October 1413 alone, his losseson a whole variety of games—cards, ‘tolman’, raffle, chance, ‘devant’ amongthem—almost totalled £70. Edmund Mortimer’s gaming addiction was, perhaps,unusual; but dice games were a favourite diversion for most magnates—includingEdmund’s father, Earl Roger, the Black Prince, and John of Gaunt. They helpedto relieve the tedium of court life and travel.

So also did the music, revels, banquets, and exchange of visits which were partof the life of the aristocratic court. Music-making and dancing were particularlyfavoured activities. Henry Bolingbroke (the future Henry IV) was a talentedmusician and so probably was his wife, Mary Bohun. They gave their childrena musical education. Bolingbroke was also much given to be entertained byminstrels, 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.

The Lord at Home 97

his visiting ones.⁵¹ On his crusading expedition to Prussia in 1392–3 he wasregularly serenaded in his chamber by minstrels and choristers. Bolingbroke’smusical tastes may have been particularly refined and well-informed; but in otherrespects 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 alllocal minstrels were present to perform at the annual feast of the assumption ofthe Virgin Mary.⁵²

Aristocratic courts must have resounded to the sound of music and thejoys of dancing and revels, especially on high feasts. Jesters provided furtherentertainment, and plays, ‘disguisings’, and ‘subtleties’ were laid on especiallyaround Christmas and the New Year. We hear, for example, of ‘divers disguisings’being staged for the countess of Warwick, with six players coming fromSlimbridge and four from Wooton as well as two minstrels on secondment fromthe entourage of Joan Beauchamp, lady of Abergavenny.⁵³ Public eating was, ofcourse, a regular and time-consuming feature of the aristocratic timetable. As wellas the lord and his immediate family, a large number of guests were frequentlyentertained—friends, relatives, fellow aristocrats, and local ecclesiastics but alsoofficials, neighbours, pilgrims, burgesses, and even the occasional tenant. Thusthe 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 hertable.⁵⁴ Some thirty to thirty-five lunched or dined regularly with her, the figurerising to 100 in March 1421 when her husband joined her from his militaryenterprises. Similar, indeed considerably larger, numbers were commonly fed inmost aristocratic households. At the great festivals of the Christian year or onspecial occasions—such as the meetings of parliament in Westminster—evenmore lavish banquets would be prepared. Henry Bolingbroke, earl (and soon tobe duke) of Hereford, laid on a magnificent dinner for the king, the queen, andhis fellow magnates at the house of the Carmelites in London in 1397. Trestles,tables, and dressers were assembled for the occasion. A professional painterwas commissioned to paint curlews, pigeons, and popinjays in gold, silver, andother 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 keptthe 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 visitingmusicians); 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).


tournaments, weddings, and christening gatherings were regular features of theactive aristocrat’s calendar. So, indirectly, was the exchange of news and gossipthrough messengers. As a great magnate toured his estates he would expect tobe entertained en route and to reciprocate in kind. When Henry Bolingbroketravelled to Devonshire in 1395 he was entertained by Edward Courtenay, earlof Devon (d. 1419), and the visit was completed by the exchange of gifts bymembers of both households. Gift exchange was indeed a highly ritualized featureof aristocratic life, reaching its peak in the exchange of New Year gifts. The listof such gifts given by Henry Bolingbroke in January 1395 may again serve asan example. They were carefully graded in hierarchy according to the status ofthe recipient. The thirteen gifts he distributed—including gifts for the king, thequeen, the duchess of Gloucester (sister of Bolingbroke’s wife), and the countessof Hereford (his mother-in-law)—cost him £53.⁵⁶

Ritualized gift-giving was an aspect of the public sociability which encompassedthe life of the aristocracy. The opportunities for sustained privacy and forcultivating one’s personal tastes were severely restricted for them. Books mighthave provided private solace for some of them. There can no longer be anydoubt that the great majority of the aristocracy were literate—not only inthe sense that they could read but also in the sense that they could construeLatin and French, the languages par excellence of the written word untilthe late fourteenth century. Some were considerable book collectors: GuyBeauchamp, earl of Warwick (d. 1315), was described as ‘bene literatus’ by acontemporary chronicler, and his grandson bequeathed thirty-nine manuscriptsto Bordesley abbey (Worcestershire); and at the other end of the century Thomasof Woodstock, duke of Gloucester (d. 1397), had a library of at least eighty-three books.⁵⁷ Nor were aristocratic women wanting in literary tastes; Margaret,countess of Devon, had a Tristam, a book called Arthur of Brittany, and anothercalled Merlin, while Eleanor (the wife of Thomas of Woodstock) possesseda French chronicle, a history of the Order of the Swan, and a French Bibleamong other books. Books, especially romances, were also borrowed from thestock kept in the royal privy wardrobe; Roger Mortimer (d. 1330) borrowedtwenty-three such volumes.⁵⁸ The majority of books cited in aristocratic willsand inventories were devotional and liturgical in character; but there was alsoa 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 theclerk of the wardrobe, 1394–5).

⁵⁷ McFarlane, Nobility, 234–5 (Guy of Warwick); Dillon and St. John Hope, ‘Inventory of theGoods’, 275–308 (Thomas of Woodstock). See also V. J. Scattergood, ‘Literary Court Culture atthe Court of Richard II’, in English Court Culture in the Later Middle Ages, ed. V. J. Scattergoodand 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.

The Lord at Home 99

1390 James Douglas, lord of Dalkeith (Midlothian), made a bequest of all hisbooks ‘both of the statutes of the realm of Scotland as of romance’.⁵⁹ Thisjuxtaposition of utilitarian (legal texts) and imaginative literature (romances) isa timely reminder of the multiplicity of worlds from which great aristocratsconstructed the universe of their intellectual experience. Some of them even wenta step further and composed their own works—such as the treatise on joustingby Thomas, duke of Gloucester (d. 1397), or the translation of the manual onhunting by his nephew, Edward duke of York (d. 1415). John Montagu, earl ofSalisbury (d. 1400), composed some poems, even though they no longer survive.Such instances should remind us that we should not underestimate the literaryambitions and sensitivities of the later medieval magnate.

Nor should we overlook his religious sensibilities. The aristocratic householdwas a religious as well as a social centre. The focal point of the nobleman’sdevotion was his private chapel, lavishly equipped—as was that of Thomasof Woodstock at Pleshey—with several altars, rich ecclesiastical vestments andplate, and an ample supply of missals, antiphons, and psalters. The lord or ladywould have his or her own personal confessor, often a friar; but there wouldalso 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 ofthe greatest magnates set their personal ecclesiastical sights even higher: nonemore so than Duke Henry of Lancaster (d. 1361). In 1353 he converted thehospital at Leicester which his father had founded in 1331 into a college ofsecular canons to be served by a dean, twelve canons, thirteen vicars, and threeother clerks and a verger. It was also to accommodate 100 poor folk and tenwomen attendants. It was as has been appropriately observed, ‘a domestic,ducal version of the Sainte Chapelle’.⁶¹ Thomas of Woodstock likewise in 1394set aside properties for a similar college at Pleshey. When the lord travelled,his clerical entourage might well accompany him: when Margaret, duchess ofClarence, travelled to Normandy to meet her husband in November 1419she was accompanied by the dean, at least ten chaplains and clerks (out of acomplement of twenty-four), and four choristers from the duke’s household. Acollege of chanting priests and choristers, financed from a landed endowment,became by the late fourteenth century the preferred form of aristocratic religiousbenefaction. Whether travelling or at home, the lord would normally be expectedto attend some of the religious services—matins, mass, and evensong—whichpunctuated 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.


Mortimer, earl of March (d. 1425), gave alms regularly—his normal donationwas 3s.4d . each time—as he travelled round the country in 1415. He alsodistributed food worth 48s. to the poor on 28 March and 20s. to a recentlybaptized infant on 6 April.⁶³ But such sums were paltry compared with hisgaming losses, and they pale into insignificance when set beside the dinnerfor 800 paupers which Eleanor, countess of Leicester (d. 1275) arranged on14 April 1265. Alms were but one aspect of the religiously inspired charity whichwas an obligatory claim on the nobleman’s coffers. He could also be expectedto contribute handsomely to building bridges and repairing churches. John ofGaunt would have hardly noticed the 100 marks which he gave for the repairof the church of St Mary at Leicester; more generous was the sum of 350 markswhich the remarkably long-lived and rich Margaret Brotherton, countess (andlater duchess) of Norfolk (d. 1399), donated towards the making of a new choirstall in the church of Greyfriars.⁶⁴ Others directed their charity to educationalpurposes, none more so than some of the wealthy dowager ladies of the fourteenthcentury. So it is that Pembroke and Clare colleges in Cambridge still testify tothe 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 formsof educational charity: such as establishing an endowment-chest at Oxford onwhich poor students could draw (as did the countess of Warwick in 1293) orsponsoring the talented son of a local tenant in his studies (as happened to anever-grateful Adam Usk at the hands of Roger Mortimer, earl of March and lordof Usk (d. 1398)), or patronizing the studies of one’s own clerks (as Elizabethde Burgh did, sending four of them to seek a legal education in London andanother two to study under a master in Oxford).⁶⁶

Nor could the aristocracy overlook their inherited family obligations, notablyas patrons of monasteries founded by their ancestors. These long-establishedmonasteries continued to press for support, all the more so, arguably, as theynoticed how the religious munificence of the aristocracy was being increasinglydrained into hospitals, schools, chantries, collegiate churches, and the moreaustere orders (notably the Carthusians). Their lobbying did not go unheeded.Three examples may serve to show how aristocratic wealth was still being lavishlychannelled in certain instances to the older religious houses. It was the wealth ofthe last Bigod earl of Norfolk (d. 1306) which alone almost certainly providedthe means for the Cistercians to build a magnificent new church for themselves asTintern 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.

The Lord at Home 101

houses in England but it remained grateful for the support it received from thecountess of Norfolk and entered her name in its book of benefactors. Anothermunificent patron of monasteries was Edmund, earl of March (d. 1381): hefinanced the rebuilding of the church of Wigmore abbey and endowed ithandsomely with lands, liberties, churches, and stock but he also left gifts tomore than thirty other religious houses—many of them closely associated withhis own estates—in his will.⁶⁷

The religious sensibilities of Earl Edmund were conventional, even conservat-ive; they would not have been out of place two centuries earlier. By the mid–latefourteenth century, religious sensibility was becoming more introspective andindividual, less corporate in its manifestations. This did not lead to any directchallenge to existing forms of worship; rather was it a search for a more privateand personal outlet for individual piety. The aristocracy with its ready access tobooks and confessors and its high level of literacy was particularly well placed toswim with this religious tide. Henry of Grosmont’s Le Livre de Seyntz Medicines,which has already been cited several times, is perhaps the most remarkableexample of the genre of self-examining penitential works which sought to bridgethe chasm between the active and the contemplative lives. Likewise the fact thatDuke Thomas of Gloucester (d. 1397) owned an English Bible in the Lollardtranslation suggests that here was a great nobleman whose exploration of religionextended 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 ofGaunt, had earlier given partisan support to John Wycliff for political reasons).It is in the late fourteenth century that books of hours became common amongthe upper classes, allowing them to pursue their search for a more personalreligion 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 availedthemselves of these opportunities more avidly than the two daughters and heirsof 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 useda book of psalms, primes and other devotions’. Her sister, Mary, married HenryBolingbroke (the future Henry IV): she inherited her father’s psalter and addedto it some personal prayers with the intention of inspiring ‘the heart with anintense sweetness’.⁶⁸

These episodes give us some insight into the spiritual lives and practices ofthe higher aristocracy and their womenfolk. We must not, of course, generalizefrom a few examples; piety, as with all other aspects of life, was a matter ofindividual taste and priority. But the greater danger surely is that our historicalanalyses 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.


characterize the life of the higher aristocracy in the later Middle Ages. We seethem pre-eminently at two levels: one at the level of their ‘public’ careers asmilitary leaders, courtiers, and leading participants (often confrontationally so)in ‘political’ life; the other—through their household and estate accounts—asthe heads of large business enterprises. Our historical sympathies need to takenote of other aspects of their lives—in the hunt, at tournaments, at their gamingtables, in their devotions, and in their acts of charity, to name but a few. It isonly by attempting to see their careers and concerns in the round, and on theirown terms, that we can begin to do justice to their role and their power, allthe more so given the centralist and royalist bias of so much modern academichistoriography.

Great aristocrats lived their lives in the public gaze. Wherever they went, theywere surrounded by a bevy of dependants, retainers, guests, and servants. A lord’sstanding was measured in good part by the magnificence and efficiency of hishousehold. It was there that his authority and power was displayed on a daily andimmediate basis; it was the resources and effectiveness of his rule of his householdthat enabled him, literally and metaphorically, to live like a lord.⁶⁹ His successas a lord could in many respects be judged at once by the way he exercised hisauthority and expressed his personality in his household, the domestic centreas it were of his whole world. The shrewd Burgundian commentator GeorgesChastellain 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 whichstrikes the eye, and that which it is, therefore, most necessary to conduct andarrange well.’⁷⁰

The noble household varied in its character and size according to the person-ality, needs, and career of the individual lord. At its core would be a resident andlargely permanent staff of menial servants, professional, salaried officers, and agroup of knights, squires, and yeomen. But this core would be augmented fre-quently by the arrival of guests, retainers, and visitors of all kinds. We can see thismost dramatically, and probably uncharacteristically, in the household accountof Earl Thomas of Lancaster (d. 1322) at Pontefract in 1318–19: the number ofhorses 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, aswe shall see, was of an extravagant size and the huge figures of horses stabledreflect 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 followinggeneral studies. Given-Wilson, English Nobility, ch. 4; C. Given-Wilson, The Royal Householdand 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).


at York and for a muster for a proposed Scottish campaign). To that extent, thefigures are not at all representative. But it is amply clear from other householdaccounts that the size of the household varied from day to day and certainly fromweek to week—as the lord’s servants left the court (extra curiam) on official orpersonal business, as high feasts were celebrated, as knights and gentlemen (whowould normally reside on their own estates) came with their attendants to spenda period at the lord’s table (bouche de court), and as the lord’s business tookhim away (on campaign, to parliament, on visits, to tournaments). On theselatter occasions the household might be formally divided into two—an inner orintrinsic household which remained resident at the lord’s principal residence anda ‘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 averagemagnate. Thus the household of Joan de Valence, countess of Pembroke(d. 1307), at Goodrich castle (Herefordshire) in 1296–7 numbered 135 and afurther twelve grooms. Aristocratic wives might also have their own householdsduring their husbands’ lives,⁷³ though they were often modest in size andsubsidized by an allowance from the lord’s coffers. But even female establishmentswere mainly staffed by men, supplemented by a few attendant gentlewomen,female servants of the chamber, nursemaids, and laundresses. The household wasa strictly stratified and hierarchical institution, reflected in seating arrangementsin hall, the number of dishes (ferculae) allotted per meal, the allowance andquality of cloth given as livery, shoe allowance, and the daily wages for thoseliving in the household (infra curiam) and those away from the court (extracuriam). In the household of Henry Bolingbroke in 1397–8 there was a tariffof resident household wages—at 2d ., 4d ., 7 1/2d ., and 12d . per day, withthe highest rate reserved for a handful of the earl’s confidants, such as HughWaterton, his devoted chamberlain.⁷⁴

It is obvious that there would be a difference in size and character betweenthe household of a retiring dowager and that of an active military lord; butthe difference would not be so great as might perhaps be expected, because alllords, men and women, were expected to have a household commensurate withtheir social status. We have just observed that Joan de Valence in 1296 had ahousehold of 135; that of John of Gaunt, duke of Lancaster, stood at 150 or soin 1390 (though that figure may err on the low side).⁷⁵ Such figures are modestcompared 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.


at least, rising to almost 600 by the later years of Richard II) and with thosefor some contemporary French ducal courts (280 for the duke of Berry, 350 forthe duke of Burgundy). On such a scale English noble households were certainlylarge but not extravagant. What extravagance could mean is well illustrated inthe case of Earl Thomas of Lancaster (d. 1322). In the two years for whichwe have accounts (1313–14 and 1318–19), his household expenses reached astaggering £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–£1,100on livery of robes, and £500–£600 on fees of servants and retainers. The totalsize of the household in 1318–19 stood close to 700.⁷⁶ These were extraordinaryfigures for an extraordinary earl in extraordinary times, all the more so since EarlThomas’s resources, impressive as they were, did not compare with the totality ofincome at the disposal of John of Gaunt. They are a reminder to us that the sizeand character of a noble household was ultimately determined by the personalityand ambitions of the lord himself.

The household was the nodal point of lordship and as such it served at least twodistinct, though not unrelated, purposes. At one level its purpose was to provide avenue where the lord’s authority and power were displayed, where he could con-sort with advisers, officers, followers, and guests, and where he would pass muchof his time when he was resident at home. This was the domus magnificencie, thehousehold above stairs in the parlance of a later age. It would be formally staffed bya cadre of officers, normally drawn from his confidants and generally more or lesspermanently resident at his court.⁷⁷ It was headed by a steward, normally a laymanof good birth; a treasurer, generally a cleric and often rewarded with one of thelord’s livings; and, in some households, a chamberlain and/or wardrober. Thesewere generally the key officials in most noble households, and it is their daily andaggregated audited accounts which are the best surviving guides to the business ofthe household. Beneath them was a further group of departmental officers—suchas the marshal (in charge of the crucial business of stabling the lord’s horses andthose of his guests), the butler, the clerk of the kitchen, the chief clerk of thechapel, 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 storehouseof arms, cloths, and equipment; it might often—as in the case of Gaunt’s greatwardrobe and that of his son, Henry Bolingbroke—be based in London, awayfrom the lord’s normal residence but in easy reach of its major suppliers, the lead-ing metropolitan merchants. In some households there could be other specializedofficers—such as Thomas of Woodstock’s secretary or Gaunt’s keeper of jewels.

The second—and more populous—level of the household was the domusprovidencie, 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.


departments including kitchen, pantry, buttery, chamber, larder, wash house,and stable. As the names of the departments suggest, its primary function was tobuy and prepare the food and the drink and to arrange the stabling for the lordand his household—no mean task when we consider that the average numberto be fed at the lord’s table might range from 50 to 100 daily. These householddepartments were staffed by a huge body of valets, pages, and grooms, oftenrewarded at differential and hierarchical rates. Thus John Mowbray, earl (andlater duke) of Norfolk (d. 1432), had six valets of the chamber, twenty-five valetsof the lord, and thirty others on his books as well as a further eleven pages onhis travels (pro viagio) in 1422–3.⁷⁸ Recruiting, organizing, and controlling suchlarge numbers of servants could not have been easy, all the more so as a goodnumber of them were expected to travel with the lord. Their role was essentiallydomestic and menial; but since they lived under the lord’s roof and servedhim at his table, they were often—within the bounds of convention—familiarwith him. Most noble wills give a high priority to paying outstanding wages tolong-standing servants and discharging them honourably on the lord’s death.Others, touchingly, went further, naming favoured servants individually andleaving them small bequests: Earl Humphrey of Hereford (d. 1361) rewardedthirty-eight of his household servants; Thomas, duke of Exeter (d. 1426), leftbequests to sixty-one of his esquires and servants.⁷⁹

Satisfying the demands of large seigniorial households, especially given theproblems of transport and the market, posed formidable problems. Grain had tobe transported from local manors and markets; fuel and fodder in large quantitieshad 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 frommeat on three days and for Lent; ample stores would have to be laid up daysor even weeks in advance, and forward parties would have to be despatched inadvance to prepare stables, rooms, and supplies for the lord’s itinerary. The listof food and wine—incomplete as it is⁸⁰—consumed by the household of therich and twice-endowed Margaret, countess of Norfolk (d. 1399), in 1385–6gives 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, 616rabbits, 520 pigeons, 491 partridges, 49 cygnets, 196 capons, 31 pheasants, 122bucks and does. The list is by no means complete; it would no doubt have beenexceeded 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’soverall 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 for1420–1; Ross, ‘Household Accounts of Elizabeth Berkeley’, 81–105.


disposable landed income in the 1390s not far short of £11,000 annually; but theproportion of that vast income he earmarked annually for recurrent householdexpenses—£5,000 for the treasurer of his household, £1,333 6s. 8d . for hisgreat wardrobe, and a further £666 13s. 4d . for his duchess’s chamber—wasnot out of line with what can be calculated for other magnates.⁸² Of theselarge sums, normally at least half was accounted for by the costs of food andwine. So it was that Joan de Valence, countess of Pembroke, spent two-thirdsof her domestic outgoings in 1296–7 on food and drink, while a quarter ofEarl Thomas of Lancaster’s budget was spent on food alone.⁸³ It is in fact oftenvery difficult to calculate accurately the total food and wine budget, becausehousehold accounting procedures often excluded both victuals consumed fromthe 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 whitefish, were consumed in huge quantities and had often to be transported overlong distances, thereby adding to the costs. Countess Joan de Valence purchased24,000 herrings in Southampton in February 1297 and had them transported bycart to Gloucester and thence to her kitchen at Goodrich castle (Herefordshire),while her supplies of dried cod were simultaneously shipped from Pembroketo Chepstow via Bristol and thence taken by packhorse to Goodrich.⁸⁴ Winehad, of course, to travel even further. It was very much the status drink of thelord and his immediate company and was often given as a present by magnates.Countess Margaret of Norfolk—whose household account for 1385–6 hasjust been cited—shipped most of her wine through Ipswich and then had ittransported overland to Framlingham castle. She purchased mainly red Gasconwine, supplemented by white Rhenish and St Emilion wine. Her wine bill forthat year alone stood at £137—and that at a time when £40–£60 would be ahandsome annual income for a modest county knight.

The consumption demands of a great household would obviously play animportant role in the economy and marketing practices of the country, allthe more so when we recall the number of such households and the way thetentacles of their activities reached throughout the country. How then werethose consumption demands met? In early centuries magnates may literally haveeaten their way around their estates—partly no doubt because itineration (aswe have seen) was a way of manifesting lordship personally, and partly becausethe mechanisms of the market were insufficiently developed to cater effectivelyfor 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 marksto 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 admirablythe scale and character of a magnate’s food purchases.


in a measure even among lay aristocrats in the later Middle Ages, though moreoften than not in the form of transporting the produce of the lord’s estates toone of his favoured residences. Earl Thomas of Lancaster (d. 1322), when hewas resident in London, still secured supplies from his manor of Aldbourne(Wiltshire), wheat from Higham Ferrers (Northamptonshire), and venison fromNeedwood (Staffordshire), all of them his own estates.⁸⁵ In the case of the long-lived Elizabeth de Burgh, lady of Clare (d. 1360), the wealth of the survivingdocumentation has allowed Jennifer Ward to tabulate the cost of her householdsupplies, indicating that at least a quarter of those supplies were derived fromher own manors. The demands of Lady Elizabeth’s household were certainly notregularly on the same scale as those of Earl Thomas; but when we recall that in1343 she distributed liveries of cloth and fur to almost 260 persons—including15 knights, 93 esquires, 21 clerks, and 108 household and estate servants—werecognize that even a thrice-widowed and relatively retiring dowager lady hadto maintain and occasionally feed a menage commensurate with her status andsocial expectations.⁸⁶

Even when the lord’s household no longer relied on the lord’s demesnemanors for its regular supplies, especially of cereals, it could still turn to them forspecialized items. Salmon and lampreys were favoured fish dishes on the nobletable, helping to relieve the tedium of seemingly endless servings of herrings andstockfish. It was well worthwhile travelling a long way to secure high-qualitysupplies of salmon and lampreys, and where could be a more reliable sourcethan the lord’s own estates? So it was that Elizabeth de Burgh was partial tothe salmon of her estates at Usk, John of Gaunt to the lampreys of his manorof Rodley (Gloucestershire) on the Severn estuary, and Margaret, countess ofNorfolk (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 herwidely scattered inheritance and at a great distance from her normal residence atFramlingham (Suffolk).⁸⁷ And so the pattern was repeated with other supplies:Henry de Lacy, earl of Lincoln (d. 1311), had cheese transported from his Welshborder lordship of Clifford to his table at Aldbourne (Wiltshire), while John ofGaunt regularly ordered dozens of rabbits—often on a weekly basis—from theextensive seigniorial warrens at Aldbourne when it came into his possession.⁸⁸ Butperhaps the most remarkable example of the way in which the widely scatteredestates of a great lord could constitute their own self-contained economic networkto meet the needs of the lord’s household was in the herds of animals which weredriven across country to the lord’s larder. The households of the earls of Lincolnat Altofts (Yorkshire), of Elizabeth de Burgh at Bardfield (Essex), and the Black

⁸⁵ Somerville, Duchy of Lancaster, I, 96.⁸⁶ Ward, English Noblewomen, 67–8; Holmes, Estates, 58–9.⁸⁷ Davies, Lordship and Society, 110–11 and the sources cited there.⁸⁸ TNA DL 29/1/2 m.2 (Lacy); Reg. JG, I, no. 1126, II, no. 739.


Prince in his hostel at London were regularly dependent on cattle supplies fromWales, Chester, and elsewhere in England.⁸⁹ Perhaps one vignette can serve toshow how this preference for the produce of the lord’s own estates (be it demesneproduce or tenant renders) created economic bonds to be set side by side with thecommercial marketing network. In 1349 twenty drovers drove over 400 head ofcattle—mainly part of the biennial render given to the earl of Hereford as lordof Brecon from the Welshmen of the area—from Brecon across country to theBohun household in Essex, to be followed in 1350 by similar herds being drivento Kimbolton (Huntingdonshire)—some 130 miles at least from Brecon—andOaksey (Wiltshire).⁹⁰ Doubtless many similar journeys were undertaken withinEngland itself—such as the bullocks driven from the ranch in Barnard Castle(Co. Durham) all the way to the Beauchamp household in Warwickshire andin the London area, or the flock of 500 sheep driven from the Stafford manorof Maxtock (Warwickshire) to another Stafford residence at Writtle (Essex).⁹¹Economic historians in their anxiety to trace the development of a money andmarket economy have perhaps not paid sufficient attention to such evidence. Itis a reminder to us that the great aristocratic inheritance could be a functioningeconomic network as well as a source of financial, social, and political power.

Nevertheless it was inevitable that the supplies of noble households shouldmainly, and increasingly so over time, be met from the market rather than fromdemesne resources. The sheer volume of the household’s needs, the complexityof its itineration patterns, and the rising demands in terms of comfort and qualityof domestic living reinforced such a development. We have seen that in thecase of Elizabeth de Burgh—who was more stationary in her residential habitsthan most of her lay peers—75 per cent of the supplies for her household werepurchased 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 localmarkets, by dispatching agents to scour the countryside, and by the virtualcommandeering of goods from any source that lay to hand, especially whenthe lord was on a journey. The household account of Margaret, countess ofNorfolk, for 1385–6 (already cited above) reveals that though she drew heavilyon the produce of her own demesne lands and the rents of her tenants she alsopurchased corn and meat from merchants and at local markets in places such asBungay (Suffolk) and Diss (Norfolk), while her agents had to travel to Londonfor items such as rice and almond. Countess Margaret was resident for the year atFramlingham and so was well-placed to arrange her purchases in advance. Otherlords 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).


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 tosurrounding towns and markets—Worcester, Ledbury, and Tewkesbury amongthem—to purchase supplies; secured his wine from Bristol and Chepstow; andhired a force of 184 men to fell and trim wood and to make it into faggots to keepout the winter cold.⁹² Duke Edward’s provision arrangements were rather ad hocin character; other lords had to be more systematic in their purchasing policies.John of Gaunt, for example, appointed professional buyers to purchase the largestocks of meat, poultry, and fish which his household required, especially whenhe was in or near London.⁹³

Great lords dealt in large sums of money, and needed to understand and managetheir finances. The debts of Henry Bolingbroke have been mentioned above,but Bolingbroke was no spendthrift. Rather was he—in common with mostof his fellow magnates—often short of ready cash and therefore borrowed itagainst the security of his anticipated income. Some magnates, it is true, seemto have been profligate. We have already cited the betting extravagances ofEdmund, the last Mortimer earl of March (d. 1425).⁹⁴ Even more obviouslyreckless was Thomas Mowbray, earl of Norfolk (d. 1405). He was, to be fair,very unlucky in his inherited circumstances: his great-grandmother, MargaretBrotherton, countess and later duchess of Norfolk in her own right, had clungtenaciously to her lands (both by inheritance and jointure) until her deathat a great old age in 1399; in the meantime, Earl Thomas’s father, anotherThomas, fell foul of Richard II’s spleen and died in exile. Such misfortunesshould have persuaded young Earl Thomas to act with great circumspection inall matters, financial and political. He failed to do so. He borrowed recklesslyfrom any source—from Roger Blickling of Norwich (£332), from his ownmen of Framlingham (£10), from the abbot of Fountains (£27), and fromRichard Nevill of London (£459) among others. His creditors took advantageof his penury: Richard Nevill charged a brokerage fee of £5 and interest at 15per 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 ofhis council journeyed to Norfolk and Suffolk ‘to raise loans for the lord’. It islittle wonder that another servant was sent to check out stories that WilliamMason was able to make silver from lead!⁹⁵ Earl Thomas might eventually haverecovered from his financial troubles; but nothing could save him from theconsequences of his political folly. It may indeed be that his financial difficultiesmade 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).


many political plots which shook England in the early years of Henry IV andsuffered the ultimate penalty, being executed on 8 June 1405, when he was notyet twenty.

But we must not generalize from the sad tale of Earl Thomas’s brief career. Whatthe late medieval nobility suffered from was not so much heavy indebtedness aschronic cash-flow problems. It was a situation compounded by the absence of aneffective native banking system, by the difficulties of getting cash levies promptlyfrom their scattered estates, and by the regular failure of the royal exchequerto pay their war wages at all promptly. In particular as they travelled abroador prepared to serve the king on a military expedition, they were driven—asindeed was the king himself—to make desperate pleas for immediate cash. Suchpleas figure regularly in the correspondence of John of Gaunt, the wealthiestaristocratic 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 taintof treason which his brother’s plotting had drawn upon the family in 1405—hewas forced to borrow 1,000 marks from the earl of Arundel and lesser sums fromothers, such as the prior of Thetford and the rector of Framlingham.⁹⁷ Magnatesborrowed from a whole range of creditor: Italian bankers, rich bishops andabbeys, cathedral chapters, London merchants, borough corporations, individualtownsmen, and even their own tenants.⁹⁸

The evidence for such borrowing is abundant; but we must take care not tojump to the conclusion (often hinted at by historians) that the later medievalmagnates were, therefore, living beyond their means and doing so to sustainbloated households and personal magnificence at a time of declining incomesfor many of them. Such a conclusion is often based on a misreading of theevidence and on a misunderstanding of the totality of sources at the disposalof the aristocracy. Most of the loans that were contracted were temporary orshort-term, generally repaid within the year. More often than not they werethe result of immediate cash-flow problems rather than of chronic indebtedness.A temporarily cash-strapped earl knew that later in the financial year he couldexpect treasure-carts laden with monies to arrive at his household from his distantestates⁹⁹ or that he would be given preferential tallies for the sums long owed tohim by the royal exchequer. In the longer term his advisers might also remindhim that he could expect a windfall when his dowager mother or grandmotherat 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’screditors, 1375); BL Egerton 8769 (Richard Beauchamp, earl of Warwick).

⁹⁹ For example, BL Egerton Roll 8730—for a treasure convoy carrying £1,400 from Wigmoreto London in 1387, escorted by eleven archers.


Some magnates did not have to wait that long: Richard Fitzalan, earl ofArundel (d. 1376) was fabulously rich in his own lifetime. At his death his coffersin 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 timewhen 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 oflending in England, especially in the later years of his life. The king, the BlackPrince, 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 ahost 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 falseconclusions from the evidence of borrowing. The survival of the register of hiscorrespondence for the years 1372–6 allows us to see how extensively he cast thenet of his borrowing, no doubt in part to finance his expeditions to France.¹⁰¹ In1372–4 alone he borrowed 11,000 marks from the earl of Arundel. But Gauntwas, of course, in terms of landed income the richest lay magnate in England inhis day, and if to this regular income we add the windfalls of his war profits andthe settlement of his claim to be king of Castile, we cannot be in doubt that hecould have comfortably weathered any temporary financial storm. Indeed whenwe next catch up with his finances in detail in 1392–3 we find him not as adebtor but as a large-scale creditor. Among his clients were his brother Thomasof 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—some-times as a result of an extravagant lifestyle, especially when their estates wereencumbered with the dower- and jointure-claims of widows, indeed successivewidows; more often, perhaps, by the misfortunes of war and politics—such asa crippling ransom or confiscation in the wake of a political misjudgement. Butthere 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 seismiceconomic and social changes that came in the wake of the recurrent outbreaksof plague from 1348–9 certainly had an impact on seigniorial policy and, tosome degree, income and authority; but the consensus of historical opinionhas broadly confirmed the short- and medium-term resilience of the governingclasses (including especially the great lay and ecclesiastical magnates) in the face ofthis challenge and the remarkable degree to which their incomes from recurrentsources stood up under pressure. Indeed recent scholarship has underlined theremarkable 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.


face of such challenges. We are also more aware that reliance solely on the landedincome of magnates gives us a partial and very incomplete view of noble wealthand power. A narrowly budgetary approach to noble income and expenditurethreatens 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 whatwe may call the domestic life of the greater aristocracy. These are aspects whichoften lie beyond the reach, or at least the direct reach, of the conventionalhistorical documentation—be it the comments of chronicles, the cut-and-thrustof political and military narratives, and even the detailed minutiae of estate andhousehold 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 theirtime in these activities would inevitably vary from individual to individual andindeed from place to place. But beyond such undeniable individualism, thearistocracy 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, wasultimately 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 wasdelegated to the lord’s council and to his senior professional officers (especiallywhen he was away on military service), it was the lord himself who often took theultimate 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 outfrom the documents. ‘My lord’, so announces one of the warrants issued in hisname, ‘ordered me in his own words in the presence of . . . his chancellor to makeout a warrant’.¹⁰³ The duke issued pardons and directions by word of mouthand declared in his will that he always kept his signet with him, so that he couldissue commands wherever he was. He could declare his will orally to his servantsand require them to report back directly to him. His officials had good reason toknow that he was not a man to be crossed lightly: the receiver of Tutbury wastold in no uncertain terms that his excuses were feeble and that the duke wasmuch displeased with him; another who had offended him was warned not ‘toapproach our court or our presence’.¹⁰⁴ Gaunt was not unusual in this respect; itis simply that evidence about his directive role is more abundant.

A second sense in which lordship was irreducibly personal lay in the fact thatthe 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.


of his lordship. The territorial, political, or military ambitions of a lord couldclearly impinge, directly or indirectly, on the lives and fortunes of his dependantsand tenants, opening doors of opportunity of service and favours but also posingrisks if the wheel of fortune turned adversely. Even at the intensely personal levelthe temper and temperament of the lord could set the tone for his lordship andreputation. It was not without good reason that Henry Stafford, the second dukeof Buckingham (d. 1483), was remembered as ‘a sore and hard-dealing man’, areputation inherited by (and fully documented for) his son.¹⁰⁵ No one who hadknown these men or had experienced their rule could doubt that their lordshipwas personal. And the women were no less masterful and arbitrary: it was thedecision of Joan Beauchamp, the formidable lady of Abergavenny, to order theexecution of three thieves on Ascension day 1401 which prompted an uprising inwhich her steward, Sir William Lucy, was killed and she and her husband werebesieged in Abergavenny castle.¹⁰⁶

Paradoxically the point is illustrated with even greater force by the hiatus ofpower 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 thedeath of a lord could create a vacuum of authority and unleash tensions hithertokept under control. It was such a vacuum that Thomas Chedworth feared in1326–7 on the death of the earl of Ulster. It was imperative, he commented, thathis heir should put in an early appearance so that his lands could be exploitedand his kinsmen and tenants governed.¹⁰⁷ In much the same vein in 1282, one ofEdward I’s officers in mid Wales was concerned about the hiatus of power follow-ing the death of Roger Mortimer. He reported that ‘he found the inhabitants veryfickle and haughty, . . . because they have no definite lord: . . . they will . . . notlong remain in peace if their liege lord does not come to them.’¹⁰⁸ Such acomment helps to explain why complaints about absentee lords were such acentral contemporary explanation of the crisis of lordship and the frailty of powerin 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 sup-plementary, 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 theequation of power and governance. Lordship was central; it was also personal.


Recent literature on castles in the late medieval British Isles abounds. A use-ful review is C. Platt, ‘Revisionism in Castle Studies: A Caution’, Medieval

¹⁰⁵ Rawcliffe, Staffords, 164–80; McFarlane, Nobility, 50–3, 223–7.¹⁰⁶ Adam Usk, Chronicle, 130–2.¹⁰⁷ Sayles (ed.), Documents on the Affairs of Ireland, no. 155.¹⁰⁸ Cal. Anc. Corr., 131.


Archaeology, 51 (2007). See also, O. H. Creighton, Castles and Landscapes(London, 2002), chs. 4 and 5; C. Coulson, Castles in Medieval Society: Fort-resses 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: AGuide by Counties (Woodbridge, 2000). For individual castles mentioned in thischapter and elsewhere in the book, M. Johnson, Behind the Castle Gates: FromMedieval to Renaissance (London, 2002) [Kenilworth]; M. Morris, The Bigod Earlsof Norfolk in the Thirteenth Century (Woodbridge, 2005) [Forncett and Chep-stow]; J. R. Kenyon, ‘Masonry Castles and Castle-Building’ in The Gwent CountyHistory. 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, MedievalTrim: History and Archaeology (Dublin, 2005). For the north of England, A. King,‘Fortresses and Fashion Statements: Gentry Castles in Fourteenth-CenturyNorthumberland’, Journal of Medieval History, 33 (2007). For ‘aristocratic land-scapes’, R. Liddiard (ed.), The Medieval Park: New Perspectives (Manchester,2007). For examples from the west of Ireland, J. Malcolm, ‘Castles and Land-scape in Uí Fhiachrach Muaidhe, c.1235–c.1400’, in Lordship in MedievalIreland: Image and Reality, ed. L. Doran and J. Lyttleton (Dublin, 2008).

For the education of aristocratic children a recent case study is A. Marshall, ‘TheChildhood and Household of Edward II’s Half-Brothers, Thomas of Brothertonand Edmund of Woodstock’, in The Reign of Edward II: New Perspectives,ed. G. Dodd and A. Musson (Woodbridge, 2006). This article also deals with theperipatetic 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 Historyof 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 demesnemanors, M. Hennessy, ‘Manorial Agriculture and Settlement in Early Fourteenth-Century County Tipperary’, in Surveying Ireland’s Past: Multidisciplinary Essaysin 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 inIreland 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


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 Londonmerchants can be followed in ‘Calendar of Documents Relating to MedievalIreland in the Series of Ancient Deeds in the National Archives of the UnitedKingdom’, ed. P. Dryburgh and B. Smith, Analecta Hibernica, 39 (2006).

4The Lord at War

In so far as the medieval aristocracy can be said to have had a profession, it was theprofession of arms. In medieval social theory, and very considerably in practicealso, all free men were potential combatants and could be summoned for militaryservice; but it was the nobility who were the warrior class par excellence. Theywere 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. Ontheir seals they presented themselves as warrior knights astride their warhorses;their effigies and monuments in death likewise perpetuated, and elaborated, theirimage as warriors in full military dress. Arms were among their most prizedpossessions and heirlooms, and as such were often individually itemized in theirwills 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 lateearl 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 thePrince 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 onthat score: ‘those that are descended of noble blood . . . (should be) drawn forth,nourished and exercised in the disciplines, doctrines and usage of school ofarms, as in using jousts, run with speed, handle with axe’.² Even the leisureactivities of the aristocracy, notably tournaments and hunting, were little morethan peacetime subsets of this culture of military prowess. Fame and honour inthis aristocratic world sprang pre-eminently from deeds of arms. The conduct ofwar, 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) whichgreatly mitigated the brutality of the experience for the nobility; but in themelee of battle not even these conventions could save a man from capture andimprisonment (as happened to the earl of Pembroke in 1372), or indeed fromdeath (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.

The Lord at War 117

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, avalorous death in battle could further enhance the prestige of a noble family. ‘Godbe praised’, such are the words ascribed to James, second earl of Douglas, killedat Otterburn in 1388, ‘not many of my ancestors have died in their beds.’ In thismilitary world, the camaraderie born from campaigning together was one of thestrongest bonds in aristocratic and knightly society. Such was often the theme oftheir 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 ofleading aristocrats (such as the earls of March, Oxford, and Northampton) inwhose company he had fought in Edward III’s French wars, and especially atCrecy.³ This was the companionship of the officers’ mess; on the roll of honourof the mess the earls, the great aristocrats, occupied pride of place. They were thenatural and acknowledged military leaders of a militarized elite.

The world of memories of this aristocracy was structured by vivid recollectionsof their campaigns and of their companions on such campaigns. The depositionsmade by the witnesses in the famous Scrope–Grosvenor dispute in 1386 as towhich of the two families had the better claim to a particular coat of arms—azura bend or —make this point vividly. One deponent recalled how he had seen thearms 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 sworethat he had seen Scrope bearing those arms when ‘King Edward . . . was beforeParis . . . and since then in all the expeditions undertaken by my Lord of Lancasterand our Lord the king’.⁴ Chivalry, heraldry, and acts of military prowess werecentral concerns for these men, both in life and in the imagination. They peopledthe past with knightly heroes and habits which validated their own behaviourand self-image in the present. Nor indeed was the present short of heroes andepisodes to be added to an already established repertoire of classical and medievalparagons. Within ten years of his death in 1376, the Black Prince was confirmedas a member of the pantheon of the immortals in the verse life of him composedby the herald of Sir John Chandos in 1386, quite possibly at John of Gaunt’sinstigation.⁵ The wars with France and even occasionally campaigns and battles inScotland and Spain provided an ample stock of deeds of arms which chroniclers,heralds, and minstrels sought to immortalize. So it was, for example, that thebattle of Otterburn (1388) was commemorated in a variety of ballads as well asin the pages of Froissart as ‘the best fought and severest of all battles’.⁶ Heroeswere 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 thewindows 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 herant 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).


heroes. After all, the pin-up hero of the fifteenth century was none other thanRichard Beauchamp, earl of Warwick (d. 1439), a man whose ‘notable actes ofchevalry and knyghtly demenaunce’ were vividly and pictorially recalled severaldecades after his death.⁷

There is, of course, much that is idealized and conventionalized in the imageof the aristocrat at war as it is presented in the literature, biographies, andmonuments of the age. But the gap between image and reality was not as wide asit is sometimes supposed. Young aristocrats began their military careers at an earlyage. Roger Mortimer, second earl of March (d. 1360), redeemed the fortunes ofhis 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 thesenior 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 BlackPrince, and fought alongside Edward III at Crecy (26 August 1346). Much of therest of his short career was preoccupied with further military enterprises—bothin France and in Scotland. He raised large forces of troops from his own estatesespecially in Wales; and so impressed was Edward III with his qualities that heappointed 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. Hisshort but dazzling military career underlined once more the claim of the greateraristocracy to be the natural military leaders of the country; it also demonstratedthat there was no quicker route to re-establish an aristocratic family’s fortune orto win the trust of the king.

Earl Roger’s career of military service was by no means unusual, except possiblyin its brevity. Whilst it was unusual for county knights to serve on more thanthree or four campaigns during their active careers,⁸ the service of dukes andearls sometimes extended over decades. Henry of Grosmont, duke of Lancaster(d. 1361) was outstanding in this respect. Between 1334 and 1360 he servedon fifteen military expeditions; on six of them he occupied the top commandposition. Nor does this exhaust his military record: he also took part in the siegeof Algeciras in 1343 and on crusade to Prussia in 1351–2. Even when he was noton campaign he was an active participant in tournaments and jousts. Much as heloved the delights of his country estates, especially hunting in the forest near hisfavourite castle of Leicester, most of his career was in fact consumed by what onemight term ‘public service’, both military and diplomatic (he headed six majordiplomatic missions abroad and participated in twelve truce conferences).

Henry of Grosmont was, perhaps, exceptional in both the length and frequencyof 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 lordsmentioned below are detailed in the relevant entries in ODNB.

The Lord at War 119

be readily paralleled by that of his close contemporary, Thomas Beauchamp,earl of Warwick (d. 1369). His military career was even longer, stretchingchronologically 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 bylong periods of truce. Yet such was the military appetite of these men that suchtruces 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 Prussiaor in the eastern Mediterranean. Indeed towards the end of our period, Henry V’swar of conquest and settlement in northern France after 1417 transformed thecharacter of English war-service and specifically that of its aristocratic leaders. Theshort-term expedition and seasonal chevauchee were now replaced by prolongedperiods of service in the occupied lands in northern France. It has been pointedout that between 1417 and 1422 a substantial proportion of the English highernobility was on extended service in France; this was reflected in the fact thatonly four dukes or earls and thirteen lords attended parliament.⁹ Such prolongedabsence, it has to be conceded, was not the norm in the period as a whole; buteven in its unusualness it is a reminder to us that war and participation in warfilled the horizons of these men, much more so proportionately than it did therest of contemporary society.

Their pre-eminence, socially and militarily, was reflected in the differentialrates of pay which they commanded in the king’s service. Whereas a mere foot-archer was paid at the rate of 2d . or 3d ., a mounted archer 6d ., a man-at-arms1s., and a knight 2s. a day, a duke’s wage in the mid fourteenth century wasfixed at 13s. 4d . a day and that of an earl at 6s. 8d .–8s. a day. Whilst theking might call on help from some of the quasi-professional war captains ofthe day—such as Sir Walter Mauny or Sir Thomas Dagworth in Edward III’sheyday—as his recruiting officers, his natural first and major port of call interms 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 proclaimedthemselves to be his ‘natural counsellors’ in respect of major political decisions.Thus when Richard II decided to inaugurate his military career by an expeditionto Scotland in 1385, almost two-thirds of the total projected force (of 4,590men at arms and 9,064 archers) was contributed by one duke (Gaunt) and tenEnglish earls.¹⁰

Nor was the situation essentially different in Scotland and Ireland. Indeed inScotland 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.


as the ‘army of Moray’), be it in their own names or as part of the ‘commonarmy’ or ‘Scottish army’ when it was summoned. Lordship in Scotland—aswe shall see—was military lordship or it was no lordship at all. The dazzlingrise of the Black Douglas family to pre-eminence, and the ways it wielded thatpre-eminence, demonstrated that truism amply enough. The same was true ofEnglish Ireland. It was men such as the earls of Ulster and Desmond who ledthe 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 lordsthat the responsibility of upholding the English dispensation in Ireland relied.Throughout the British Isles, therefore, aristocratic power and military leadershipwent hand in hand.¹¹

Given that this was so, it is pertinent to ask how, and how far, the militarypreoccupations and aspirations of the greater aristocracy affected their lordship,and the lives of their dependants, in general. One thing is clear: since militaryactivity and military leadership were among the premier tests of aristocratic statusand standing, the capacity to raise an army was a high priority for every leadingmagnate. He could fulfil that obligation in several ways. He could first turn tohis own household, specifically to its military members. In Norman Englandand in much of contemporary Scotland and Ireland, the military household ofthe great lord was the fulcrum of the lord’s power—defending his person andfamily, imposing his will, escorting him on his travels, and forming the core ofany expeditionary force that he assembled, either in his own service or that of theking. That is why the military retinue has been rightly regarded as ‘one of thebasic social organisms of medieval Europe’.¹² In the Highlands of Scotland andin the militarized and deeply unstable frontiers of medieval Ireland, such militaryhouseholds—living at the lord’s table, stabling their horses in his stables, andalways 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 worldwas already a distant memory. But this did not mean that the capacity to raise aneffective military force did not remain a primary aristocratic obligation.

It could be, and was, discharged in a variety of ways. Except possibly on theborderlands of Wales and Scotland, it was no longer for the most part a case of amilitary household living at the lord’s table. Rather was it that a set of concentriccircles of obligation were, formally or informally, formed which allowed a greatlord to assemble a military force when it was needed. The innermost circlewas composed of those who were formally retained to serve the lord for lifein peace and war. These formal indentures of service—which begin to survivein 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.

The Lord at War 121

obligations and responsibilities of lord and retainer in considerable detail. Theywere contractually and legally enforceable and often specify the supporting forceswhich a retainer should bring to the service of his lord, the terms (includingboard and lodging) on which they should serve, compensation for horses loston campaign, and associated issues. These indentured retainers have attracteda great deal of attention in historical writing because historians feel mostcomfortable about affiliations and obligations of service when they are formallydocumented.¹³

But the lord’s retinue (broadly defined) extended far beyond the ranks of thosefor whom a formal indenture of retinue survives. It should normally be extendedto include, at least potentially, those who drew an annuity or received his liveryor badge. Such men must have regarded themselves as beholden to him, and oneobvious 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 whohad no formal link with the lord nor necessarily received any regular reward fromhim but who nevertheless moved in the orbit of his power and were therebyamenable to his summons.

This latter group included the tenants and inhabitants of his estates. In Englandthe king, theoretically, had access to the military services of all able-bodied menin the realm and he could, and did, exercise that claim through commissionsof array, shire levies, and other recruitment procedures. But in the northernborderlands and in areas such as the palatinates of Chester and Lancaster or inthe duchy of Cornwall, great lords took an almost proprietorial view of theirown 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 numbersof troops from the county of Cheshire. The Prince served on the basis of acommission from the king, his father; but the recruitment lay in his own handsand that of his officials. Thus he ordered the deputy-justice of Chester (the headof the county palatine’s administration) to test and array 200 archers from allthe hundreds of the county ‘in whosoever’s lordship they be’ and, in addition, toarray 100 of the best archers that could be found.¹⁴ On this and other occasionsthe 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 lordshipswere indeed among the major recruiting sources for the great aristocratic armiesof the fourteenth century. It was the lord’s officers who summoned, arrayed, andequipped the troops so recruited and any attempt on the part of the king to recruitdirectly in these areas was fiercely resisted. Normally such aristocratic armieswere 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 ‘PrivateIndentures’. See also Holmes, Estates, chap. 3; J. M. W. Bean, From Lord to Patron: Lordship in LateMedieval 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.


could also be deployed for more sinister purposes. During the turbulent politicsof Edward II’s reign, for example, such privately recruited forces furthered theambitions of men such as the earls of Lancaster and Hereford and, most notablyof all, Roger Mortimer of Wigmore, the first earl of March (d. 1330). Even agreat 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 lifewas in danger from rampaging peasants in July 1381, he ordered a force of over500 men to be assembled to escort him from Berwick to Knaresborough. Thearmies of fourteenth-century England were more aristocratic in recruitment andcharacter 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 manifestationsof aristocratic power.¹⁵

What was true of England was a fortiori even more true of Scotland andIreland. Both of them were, in different degrees, lands of war in as muchas periodic forays and campaigns to assert authority and quell enemies couldregularly be part of the cursus of a great aristocrat’s life. They were also societiesin which leadership on campaign was a regular, and regularly tested, featureof a nobleman’s effectiveness. In Scotland the earls were the natural leaders ofregional armies, and their position as such was sometimes formally recognizedin charters. Thus when King Robert I (d. 1329) gave Thomas Randolph themost ample powers in Moray in 1312 he required the men of the region toperform their common army service to Thomas and his heirs, as should thosewho ‘used to follow the banner of Moray in times past’.¹⁶ What King Robertwas doing was no more than recognizing the role of the aristocracy in raisingand leading the military forces of regional Scotland. Lordship was measured inmen, pre-eminently in military men. That explains the famous riposte of theHighlander 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 westernScotland or in Ireland or in the March of Wales than it did in England. Buteven in England the capacity to raise an army and to draw on a pool of militarysupporters 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 Scottishfrontier in 1378, one of his first actions was to dispatch a messenger with a letterof summons to the lord’s retinue (pro retinencia sua munienda).¹⁸ It is a reminderthat 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.

The Lord at War 123

to do so at short notice. When Earl Edmund’s son Roger (d. 1398) assembledan army to accompany Richard II on his campaign in Ireland in 1394–5 hisforce was gathered at speed and led by knights and bachelors (such as Sir HughCheyney, Sir John Pauncefoot, and Leonard Hakeluyt) who were in receiptof retaining annuities from him.¹⁹ Likewise when the earl of Warwick faced acritical situation in Wales in 1403 his immediate response was to summon hisretinue (ad muniendum diversos de retinencia domini) to assemble at Warwick.²⁰But it is from the ample official correspondence of John of Gaunt that we cancatch the best-documented glimpse of recruiting military lordship in action. Hecertainly cast the net of his retinue widely. When he was assembling a large armyfor his great chevauchee in France in 1373 he ordered 650 men at arms ‘of ourretinue’ (de nostre retenue) to be enlisted. Or, to take another example, in August1383 he sent individual letters, via the local receiver, to his bachelors and squiresin Lancashire and Cheshire to get themselves ready for military duty. He alsoappended twenty-four unendorsed letters in a similar vein to be dispatched bythe receiver to those whom he (the receiver) thought were fit and sufficient toserve him.²¹

All in all, the life of a great aristocrat, at least during his years of activeservice, must have revolved considerably around the need to raise and lead anarmy. Campaigns themselves were generally seasonal and short; but the logisticalproblems of recruiting men, finding horses, assembling arms and uniforms,and arranging supplies took months of preparation. So did the outstandingclaims—for unpaid wages, compensation for horses lost, reimbursement ofgoods commandeered, and the settlement of ransom demands—that came inthe wake of every campaign. The whole exercise placed considerable strains onthe stamina and administrative expertise of the aristocrat and his officials. Anadministrative cadre basically and normally geared to maximize income fromestates and tenants and to provide the wherewithal for the lord’s luxuriouslifestyle had to be transformed into a military commissariat. This was oneof the major challenges of aristocratic lordship, a challenge which has beenfrequently overlooked, or underestimated, because of the nature of the survivingdocumentation and its overwhelming royal and royal exchequer orientation.How, in short, did men such as Henry of Grosmont (d. 1361), EdmundMortimer (d. 1381), or Richard Beauchamp (d. 1439) cope with the demandsof exercising military lordship?

The short answer is that they became military entrepreneurs, raising men andsupplies where they could. They would certainly call—as we have seen—onthe services of those who were beholden to them through a formal indentureof 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.


real sense of obligation and service. This was the lord’s ‘retinue’ in the fulland quasi-permanent sense of the word. But it was very rare, particularly inEngland, for even the greatest lord to have sufficient men in these categoriesto 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 specificcampaign. The contract which the councillors of Roger, earl of March (d. 1398),concluded with Walter Fitz Walter on 15 May 1398 illustrates this kind ofrecruitment arrangement well.²² It specified service in a particular theatre ofwar—Ireland—and for a clearly delimited period—six months. It stipulated indetail the body of troops—six esquires and twenty mounted archers—whichWalter was to provide and entered carefully into details of services—on issuessuch as shipping, gains of war, and entitlement to sustenance (bouche de court) bythe earl—and into other contingencies that might arise. There were many menlike Walter Fitz Walter in fourteenth-century England—military free-floaterswho in effect offered their services as major military subcontractors to thegreater aristocracy. Their commitment lasted no longer than the term of theircontracts; they might then move into the service of another lord. They generallyin turn recruited the men whom they had pledged to provide by enteringinto sub-sub-contracts (in effect) with a pool of local military recruits, oftencontributing no more than a man-at-arms or an archer apiece. This process ofgrass-roots recruitment is normally hidden from documentary view because itwas not of direct relevance to exchequer accounting processes; but in at leasttwo cases—the subcontracts of Sir John Strother in preparation for the earl ofMarch’s expedition to Brittany in 1374 and of Sir Hugh Hastings for Thomas ofWoodstock’s expedition thither in 1380—these subcontracts have fortuitouslysurvived. They reveal to us how deeply into the fabric of local society the militaryrecruitment policies of the aristocracy reached, albeit indirectly.²³

Assembling an expeditionary force posed daunting problems of negotiationand organization at all levels. The lord himself might bargain very hard withthe king on the terms on which he would serve. Nowhere is this more vividlyrevealed than in a letter which Edward I dispatched, probably in April 1301, toRichard de Burgh, earl of Ulster (d. 1326), in an attempt to persuade the earlto contribute a substantial force to the king’s army in Scotland.²⁴ The mixtureof cajolery, flattery, promise of remission of debt, commitment to the speedypayment of wages, and an almost desperate appeal to the earl’s sense of dutyand honour reveals that there was far more to the process of recruitment thanmight at first appear in bland exchequer documents. Military expeditions weretruly 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 JohnStrother, 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.

The Lord at War 125

no means all the trump cards were in the king’s hand. The arts of negotiationand enticement had to be practised all the way down the line, even to thelevel of recruiting foot archers. Advance payment of wages could be made toarchers to ensure that they set out in good time and arrive promptly at theport of embarkation; more important personnel were to be enticed by offersof two oaks from the local forest if they enlisted; ‘but if not, not’.²⁵ Whereblandishment did not work, strong-arm tactics could be pursued. The localtenantry might be assembled at the castle gate and those who were unwilling toserve might find their animals seized and their purses emptied by a compulsorywar subsidy.²⁶

These various recruitment strategies must have put a considerable strain on thelord’s officers, central and local. Nor did their problems end there. Selecting thecaptains for the local contingents and arranging a timetable and an itinerary forthem likewise posed daunting problems. So did the commandeering of horses,so essential for the army’s success. Baggage horses were also essential: so it wasthat the Black Prince ordered thirty of the best and strongest baggage horses tobe commandeered to meet his needs overseas.²⁷ Even more impressive were themeasures taken by John of Gaunt to ensure that he had sufficient horses for hisgreat chevauchee in France in 1373. It was to his own estates that he turned in thefirst instance—buying horses at Pontefract fair, making pointed requests to mensuch as the abbot of Furness and Whalley to volunteer gifts of horses, and settingquotas of horses to be assembled from his various estates—twenty from Tutbury,thirty from Higham Ferrers, a further thirty from Norfolk and Suffolk, forty fromLincolnshire, and so forth.²⁸ Arms likewise had to be bought in large quantities:when Thomas of Woodstock made preparations for his proposed expedition toIreland in 1392 (to which we will return below) he spent £226 in advance onarms, including 700 bows and 1,900 arrows—for a very modest force.²⁹ Theprovisioning of the army, both prior to its departure and subsequently, posedhuge commissariat problems. The men of Devon, for example, had no optionbut 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 £1,030was spent in purchasing victuals and provisions in England for dispatch to thelord’s household overseas.³⁰ War engines had to be got ready; special craftsmensuch as carpenters, masons, and iron-workers had to be recruited; and uniformshad sometimes to be bought so that the lord’s army could be distinctive andcultivate its own esprit de corps.³¹ Last, but by no means least, if the expeditionwas 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.


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 gettingthem ready for the voyage fell to the lord and his officers, as the account of theEarl Marshal’s expedition of 1422–3 demonstrates.³²

This list by no means exhausts the multiple problems which confrontedany great aristocrat anxious to discharge his duty of military leadership in theMiddle Ages. The tendency of historians has been to underrate their complexity,concentrating largely on the size and composition of the aristocratic contractarmies (where the exchequer accounts are an invaluable source of information),but underestimating the associated problems involved for lords in recruiting anarmy and preparing it for service, especially overseas. It was a task which taxedthe administrative skills of the lord and his cadre of officials to the utmost. Thelord’s household was put on a war footing. In the event of an expedition hewould leave a skeletal administration, often under the control of his wife, athome while taking most of his key household officials and confidants with himin what was termed ‘the foreign household’. The two households would be keptin frequent contact with each other by the regular dispatch of messengers andmessages. The fact that war altered the priorities and habits of aristocratic lordswas 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 Gloucesterin 1392—to deal with the complex financial issues involved in major militaryenterprise.

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 des-perately short supply. It took a messenger and two valets 147 days—admittedlyan exceptionally slow journey—to take 1,500 marks to John of Gaunt in Gas-cony in 1372.³³ The slowness of travel was more than matched by the slowpayment habits of the English exchequer. Indeed delay in receiving full paymentof war wages was a constant irritant in crown–magnate relations. It contributedmightily, so at least the Percies claimed, to the catastrophic breakdown in rela-tions between Henry IV and the Percy family in 1403. The cash-strapped JohnMowbray, duke of Norfolk (d. 1432), was kept waiting for eight years for thewar wages due to him.³⁴ Others were fobbed off with uncashable tallies. In thesecircumstances it is little wonder that greasing the palms of well-placed officialswas a necessary art for war commanders anxious to recover their wages and tosolve their cash-flow problems. John Mowbray certainly felt that it was essentialfor him to pay a ‘regard’ to the clerks of the royal exchequer and to lay on a mealin 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, EarlMarshal, 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.

The Lord at War 127

good will’ (pro eorum benevolencia sua).³⁵ In the event, these various ploys didhim 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 torecruit for a campaign to the long-drawn-out efforts to recoup war wages andto settle claims to ransoms and the compensation for horses lost—must havecast very long shadows across his career. We see greater aristocrats primarily ontheir estates, in the turmoil of high politics, parading in their magnificence inparliament, in tournaments, and in the chase; we are also presented with theiridealized self-images in accounts of their deeds of arms and in their splendideffigies, but we should not underestimate the degree to which preparation for,and participation in, war and campaigns consumed much of their time andenergy, especially in the period from 1290 onwards. Furthermore warfare was,more especially in England, an activity where private prowess and ambition andpublic duty met. Successful war was one of the best ways of forging an effectiverelationship between crown and magnates; nowhere did the interests of bothparties more closely coincide.

War was, literally and metaphorically, a noble enterprise. It was, at least intheory, the ultimate raison d’etre of the aristocracy as a status group and it alsoprovided a theatre in which their feats of arms could redound across Europe anddown the generations. Distaste for war and its consequences was not a sentimentwhich the aristocracy understood. On the contrary, they had developed a wholehost of conventions and practices which immunized them—but not ordinarytroops nor civilians—to a considerable degree from its worst effects. More thanthat, they approached campaigning not only in a spirit of adventure but also veryconsiderably in a spirit of profit-making.

There were certainly fortunes to be made in war and, given the position ofthe magnates as war leaders, the greatest profits came their way. Contemporariesrealized as much. The shrewd Sir John Fortescue observed that ‘the lords makeprofits, often very large, out of their contracts with the government, and enrichthemselves with profit and plunder.’³⁶ Modern scholarship, especially the seminalwritings of K. B. McFarlane, have confirmed and elaborated such a claim. Moneycould certainly be made out of military contracts, as Fortescue claimed. Theprofit that William Heron, Lord Say (d. 1404) had made from overcharging onhis war wages troubled his conscience sufficiently for him to instruct his executorsto repay 120 marks!³⁷ Ransoms and the prospect of ransom feature regularly inindentures of service and must have made the mouth of many a would-be warriorwater 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.


Grosmont from the sacking of Bergerac in 1345,³⁹ and similar tales of how theresidences of English aristocrats were rebuilt and modernized from the fortunesof war in France. Neither in Scotland nor in Ireland were similar fortunes tobe made; but the proceeds of booty, pillage, and ransom must likewise haveenhanced the reputation and drawing power of men such as the earls of Douglasand Desmond.

Nowadays the appeal of war and the profits that could be made fromwar—especially in the century after 1330—is not likely to go by defaultas an argument, especially in respect of the aristocracy. Indeed the danger,paradoxically, is that the historiographical pendulum may have swung toofar. War did involve risks, as well as profit, for the aristocracy. Fortescuenotwithstanding, not all of them made a killing from charging extortionate payfor war service. As usual it was the least fortunate who lost out. The Earl Marshaltried 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 recoupedonly £1,450 in wages. Nor was this a unique case: Sir Hugh Despenser (d. 1349),another member of a declasse family, was still owed £2,770 in wages from theexchequer at his death. Ransoms could indeed be a major windfall; but equallyto 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 hislands in England to meet the cost of his ransom.⁴⁰ Even a rich family like thePercies 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 fromhim after his capture at the battle of Otterburn (1388), it required a royalsubsidy and virtually a national subscription campaign to help him out of hispredicament.⁴¹ Even before the tide of the war began to turn in France, the pricethat some of the magnates had to pay escalated. The duke of York, the earl ofArundel and two de la Pole brothers were killed in 1415, Clarence in 1422; andHuntingdon and Somerset were captured the same year.

It would not make sense to attempt to draw up a balance account of the profitsand losses of war on aristocratic fortunes and careers. The story would vary fromfamily to family, from generation to generation, and even within the lifespanof an individual magnate. In general, the English aristocracy enjoyed what maybe termed a favourable ‘balance of war’ in its prolonged, if spasmodic, warfarewith the French in the period 1337–1429. They fought their campaigns forthe most part on French territory, scored some notable victories, and enjoyedthe profits, plunders, ransoms, and landed gains of successful war. But even inFrance, let alone in Scotland, Ireland, Flanders, and elsewhere, the sustainedimpact 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.

The Lord at War 129

taxation should be taken into account. In truth the aristocracy made no suchcalculations. Leadership in war—whether it be in the king’s campaigns or onindividual forays—was their duty and their metier; it was also of course anopportunity 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 obligationsthrough the formal contracts, indentures, and payment vouchers of the royalexchequer. But very occasionally we have evidence from the magnates themselvesof how an army was raised and, thereby, what was involved in mounting anexpedition. 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 forBrittany until late spring 1375.⁴² Earl Edmund had good reason to be suspiciousof the timetable and firmness of intention of the operation. In 1372 he had ledan earlier ill-fated expedition to Brittany which had been called off after fifty-fourdays. This time Mortimer insisted that a substantial portion of the wages ofhis retinue be paid in advance; indeed the exchequer records make it clear thatover £9,106 had been so paid even before the army left Plymouth.⁴³ It wasdoubtless by such advance payment alone that the army could be kept intact inthe Plymouth area during the winter of 1374–5 and, in any case, actual wagesin hard cash were a far more reliable enticement than the promise of exchequertallies for the future. Behind the bland accounting formulae of the exchequer layconcealed a great deal of negotiation and cajoling.

In the event, the Mortimer expedition of 1375 was no more successful thanthe one of 1372. The fault probably did not lie with Mortimer or with his fellowcommanders. They had initially agreed to serve for one year in Brittany, beingpaid wages for six months only and recouping their expenses thereafter fromransoms, booty, and the other ‘profits of war’—in itself an eloquent commenton the English government’s view of how the costs of war were to be met. Butthe 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 hisallies to the negotiating table. And when the time was right for such negotiationsEdmund Mortimer and his fellow commanders found that any prospect ofmilitary glory and profits which they may have entertained was snatched fromthem. On 20 July 1375—less than three months after he and his army hadlanded in Brittany—Edmund Mortimer was peremptorily ordered to returnwith his retinue to England.⁴⁴ His sense of disillusion with the handling of thewhole 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 ChristopherHatton’s Book of Seals,, 162; that for the 1375 expedition is in TNA E 101/34/6.

⁴⁴ Holmes, Good Parliament, 45.


crisis of 1376, when his steward (Sir Peter de la Mare) acted as Speaker at theGood Parliament.

But perhaps even more interesting from our point of view are the shaftsof light that the 1375 expedition throws on the question of how aristocraticarmies were assembled. A document in the Mortimer archives shows that EarlEdmund raised his army in part from the ranks of his own retainers andtenants.⁴⁵ Several of his leading Herefordshire tenants and retainers (now orprospective) turned out to serve him—including Sir John de la Bere, Sir JohnBromwich, Sir Ralph Lingen, Sir Robert Tresgoz, and John Joce. Equallyinteresting is the way in which Mortimer scoured his own estates in Wales andthe March for foot soldiers—eleven from Ludlow, eleven from Ewyas, six fromPembridge and Kingstone, twelve from Dinas, fourteen from Cedewain, threefrom 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 anexpeditionary force from his own resources. He relied on other lords to raisecontingents 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 healso cast his recruiting net much further afield. One of the recruiting agents towhom Earl Edmund turned was Sir John Strother, whose fascinating subcontractshave been cited above. Strother was not a Mortimer tenant or retainer, nor did hemove in Mortimer’s geographical orbit (he came from Northumberland). Buthe was a well-known military recruiting agent who offered his services and hismen to any magnate seeking to assemble an army.⁴⁶ Assembling, coordinating,and leading an army composed of such motley groups, and then over-winteringthem in Plymouth for months, posed huge problems; but they were the sort ofproblems which medieval magnates regularly faced.

Another glimpse of the way an aristocratic expeditionary force was assembledis provided by the unusual survival of the account of the treasurer of war ofThomas, duke of Gloucester (d. 1397), for his proposed Irish expedition of1392.⁴⁷ Once more what we glimpse beyond the formal contract is the hardbargaining, led on Gloucester’s side by members of his council and especiallySir Thomas Mortimer (who in effect headed the administration of the greatMortimer estates during the minority of Earl Roger (d. 1398)).⁴⁸ Gloucestersecured the payment of a bonus or ‘regard’ of 600 marks, payable in advance ofthe 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 TNAE 101/74/1–3.

⁴⁸ For Thomas Mortimer see the entry by R. R. Davies for Roger Mortimer, fourth earl ofMarch, in ODNB 39, 403–4.

The Lord at War 131

the actual period of service. He also extorted a stipulation that the number oftroops to be taken on the expedition should be left to his discretion and that hewas discharged of responsibility for any deterioration in the situation in Irelandpending 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 divertedto purposes not directly related to the proposed expedition.

Equally interesting is the list of squadron commanders to whom the duketurned to provide him with an army.⁴⁹ He could obviously call on those whohad in effect a professional, long-term link with his service—such as Sir WalterClopton, a life retainer, or Sir John Clifton, who was in receipt of a regularannuity. Others were men who had already served under Gloucester in earliercampaigns—Lord Darcy in Brittany in 1381, Sir John Clifton in expeditionsin 1377 and 1380, or Robert Turk in the aborted Prussian expedition of1391. Some were quasi-professional war captains, always ready for adventureand for the windfalls of war. Such a one was Sir John Mascy of Puddington(Cheshire) who provided the largest contingent for Gloucester’s force. Manyof them had seen service in many theatres of war and in the pay of differentmagnates—Clifton in Brittany and Lithuania, Darcy in Brittany and Scotland,Robert Turk with de la Pole and Arundel, Roger Drury with de Vere in Irelandand Arundel at sea. These men, therefore, were not regulars in Gloucester’sservice but they could draw on a wide range of experience. The problem wouldbe converting them into an effective and cohesive fighting force, especially inthe challenging conditions which they would face in Ireland with its fragmentedpolities, difficult terrain, and faction-ridden English and Gaelic societies. Inthe event Gloucester’s modest Irish expedition of 1392 was aborted; but thedocumentary detritus it has left opens a welcome window on the recruitmentpractices of an aristocratic world.

Had the duke of Gloucester actually crossed to Ireland in 1392 he would havesoon encountered a society where the experience of warfare was very differentfrom the world he was familiar with in lowland and southern England. He wouldalso have witnessed a military lordship which was a far cry from the routinesand civilities of southern England. This chapter, indeed this whole book, isoverwhelmingly based on that English experience. From this fact there is noescape: there is no documentary evidence remotely comparable for Scotland orIreland with that available from the (overwhelmingly royal) archives for England.This is particularly ironic and regrettable with regard to military lordship, sincethere 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 sourcesincluding Holmes, Estates; Goodman, Loyal Conspiracy; Walker, Lancastrian Affinity; Morgan, Warand 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).


thereby so also was lordship—in the outer zones of the British Isles than itwas in the heartlands of England. So we should at the very least indicate, veryroughly and inadequately, in what ways military lordship and the experience ofwar differed from one part of the British Isles to another.

Even within England itself there were zones—broadly speaking on the frontiersof the kingdom—where the military aspect of lordship and power was to thefore in a way which would have distressed the peoples of midland and southernEngland. The border counties of northern England were one such area. Herefor much of our period raids and counter-raids, cattle rustling, booty taking,and the building of tower-houses indicate a society in recurrent preparation forcampaign, if not for war. Cheshire was another area notorious for its militarismand for the disproportionate contribution it made to the recruitment of Englisharmies. So, of course, were the March and Principality of Wales. The March ofWales was the most densely encastellated region of the British Isles, while Walesas a whole contributed huge forces (in proportion to is population) to Englisharmies in Scotland and on the continent—such as the contingent of 6,200 forthe Scottish campaign of 1322. Lordship and power in all of these areas layconsiderably in the leadership of men and the assembling of armies.⁵⁰

The same was even more true of much of Ireland and Scotland. MedievalIreland, it has been said, was a society where warfare was ‘a routine part of life’.⁵¹That 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 theking of England’s campaigns (especially in Scotland) and they could also providethe escort for the justiciar as he toured the country in order to impose a modicumof authority on it.⁵² But equally, and indeed more regularly, English lords andGaelic chiefs alike used their troops to pursue their own ambitions and to furthertheir quarrels. In the essentially decentralized and localized collection of societiesthat was medieval Ireland, the powers of military lordship and the resources ofmilitary might were of the essence of aristocratic power. The standing of mensuch as Maurice Fitz Thomas, earl of Desmond (d. 1356), or of the Butler earlsof Ormond rested on a variety of sources, but far more obviously and regularlythan 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) especiallythe kerne from among their dependants, and on the billeting and feeding ofthese troops. However much these great magnates turned in the outer circles ofEnglish court culture, the landscape of their lives and lordship was dominated byforces and circumstances far removed from those of aristocratic lordship in mostof England.

⁵⁰ For Cheshire see esp. Morgan, War and Society in Medieval Cheshire and for the March ofWales, Davies, Lordship and Society, ch. 3.

⁵¹ Frame, Ireland and Britain, 222.⁵² Note the tables in Frame, English Lordship in Ireland, 40, 79.

The Lord at War 133

The same was true of much of Highland and western Scotland. Indeed powerand military leadership in most of Scotland was organized on regional andprovincial lines in a way that was alien to the centralized, royal, tradition of thecontrol of war and peace in England. In Scotland the earls retained their controlof at least the mustering of the ‘common army’, the servicum Scoticanum.⁵³ Theimperatives of local warfare and competition were too immediate to be able towait on coordinated royal direction. ‘Whereas,’ admitted Robert Bruce, earl ofCarrick (d. 1304), ‘I have often vexed the abbey’s tenants . . . by leading them allover the country in my (my italics) army, although there was no summons of thecommon army of the realm.’⁵⁴ The truth was that in the highly competitive andmilitarized societies of upland Scotland the proprieties of constitutional powerwere regularly overtaken by the actual exercise of military power, especiallyin the world of ‘the highly militarized clan-lordships’ of the Highlands andthe west.⁵⁵

This was a world in which Gaelic lords hired the galloglass of Argyll and theHebrides to reinforce their own kerne. Rival earls and local leaders hired theirown mercenary bands of kerne (‘caterans’ as they were called), and deployedthem ruthlessly in the pursuit of their ambitions. None more so than AlexanderStewart, earl of Buchan (d. 1405), the notorious ‘Wolf of Badenoch’, whoserumbustious flaunting of his power included the burning of Elgin cathedral byhis 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 asthat of his son Alexander, earl of Mar (d. 1435), who waged ‘semi-permanentlocal warfare’ to extend the area of his authority in north-eastern Scotland, orthe lordship of the Campbells in Argyll.⁵⁶ Such an active and aggressive militarylordship could only in exercised—in Scotland as in Ireland—by quarteringthese bands of hired followers on the countryside. It was a very differentkind of lordship from that familiar to most English magnates and thereby tomost English historians. ‘By the close of the fourteenth century’, so it hasbeen argued, ‘it was clear that a substantial military following, which lifted itssupplies and wages directly from tributary populations and estates, had becomean essential element in the successful exercise of power across much of GaelicScotland.’⁵⁷

Nor should we too readily dismiss such a phenomenon as one peculiar tobackward, 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.


1290s, was a society habituated to war and invasion. In such a society power,including political power, naturally gravitated towards those who excelled inthe arts of military leadership. Nowhere is this more self-evident than in thecase of the Black Douglas family, the most powerful parvenu aristocratic familyin fourteenth- and early fifteenth-century Scotland. It is not the details of thefamily’s astonishing rise to this premier position which interests us here. This hasbeen amply analysed in Michael Brown’s book, and we have already very brieflycharacterized 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 militaryleadership (duly mythologized by the family) laid the foundations for astonishingroyal liberality, both in lands and in extensive judicial and fiscal liberties. Thefamily’s lordship, especially in the Marches, was founded very considerably onwar-leadership rather than on landed status and resources, though the lattermight follow where the former had been asserted. ‘Alliances and submissionsbased on the tide of war’, it has been pointed out, ‘turned into more lasting bondsof lordship and landholding’. It is an observation which applies not only to theDouglas family or indeed to Scotland; it is a window to the way that the powers oflordship were often assembled in medieval society generally. We catch a glimpseof the process at work in the charter of 1354 to William, Lord Douglas, grantingto him ‘the leadership of the men (my italics) of the sheriffdoms of Roxburgh,Selkirk and Peebles’. Such leadership had to be regularly and effectively exercisedif it was to be converted into sustained lordship. It was a task at which Archibaldthe Grim excelled, especially in eastern Galloway. There, in the terms of the royalcharter of 1369, he pacified the district and asserted his authority ‘forcefully inperson’.⁵⁹ The great tower which he built at Threave in the heart of the lordshipstood as a visual and forbidding expression of the military power which lay at theroot of his standing.

Military power was the original foundation and ultimate sanction of alllordship in medieval society. But the format and prominence of such powervaried greatly from place to place and from period to period; so did the contextwithin which it operated and/or was allowed to operate. This truism is broughthome by even a cursory consideration of military lordship in different partsof the British Isles. It is from England with its exceptional archives of servicein royally commissioned armies that far and away the best evidence survives.Paradoxically the very richness of that evidence may distort our picture of militarylordship generally. From a broader perspective it is the unusualness of the Englishexperience which is perhaps most striking. England enjoyed the luxury in ourperiod of fighting its wars in other peoples’ backyards. It was a society where themaking of war was clearly an exclusive royal right and where aristocratic armieswere 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.

The Lord at War 135

much rougher, unregulated, and fragmented worlds of much of Ireland and ofparts of Scotland was to encounter a very different world. It was a world of raidsand counter-raids, pillage, ‘private’ truces, groups of quasi-professional warriors(kerne/caterans, idlemen are some of the contemporary phrases), and billetingof such troops on the local population. Here lordship was military lordship orit was no lordship at all. Not the least of the attractions of attempting to studythe nature of lordship across the face of the British Isles is that it serves toremind us of how lordship had to follow the contours of power, geography, andcustom.⁶⁰

A social elite which was trained from childhood for the prospect of war andwhose imaginations were fed on a diet of ‘feats of arms’ and tales of prowesslived in dread of the tedium of peace. Particularly was such tedium profound in acountry such as England. One solution to the tedium which became increasinglypopular from the thirteenth century was to stage a joust (a combat betweentwo mounted knights armed with lances) or a tournament (a contest betweentwo teams using sharp weapons in a melee). Such occasion allowed the chivalricclasses to let off steam, to socialize with their friends and peers, and to keep theirmilitary skills in good order. The tournament became so much part of the cursusof the aristocratic year that attendance at it was not infrequently mentioned asan obligation in indentures of retinue.⁶¹ There was clearly an agreed timetable ofknown tournaments and of venues—Blyth, Hereford, Coventry, Exeter, Bristol,Guildford, Kenilworth, Hertford, Kennington, and Dunstable among them. Norwere English magnates unwilling to travel abroad, especially to Calais, to indulgetheir passion for the sport.

Jousts and tournaments could certainly be risky occasions: at least threemembers of the Mortimer family are recorded in the Wigmore chronicle asbeing killed in tournaments, while the death of the seventeen-year-old heirof the earldom of Pembroke in a tournament in 1389 extinguished the maleline of the Hastings family. But in spite of such tragedies, tournaments andround tables were superb displays of aristocratic theatre. They bonded thearistocracy in a common cult of chivalry and prowess and became high festivalsof aristocratic sociability. The most lavish of such occasions became part of thecollective memory of the nobility. Such, for example, according to contemporarychronicles, was the lavish three-day tournament held at Kenilworth in 1279by Roger Mortimer of Wigmore, Edward I’s confidant. It was attended, sowe are told, by 100 knights and as many ladies.⁶² The leading lady was noneother 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.


more impressive, though also politically sinister, was the famous tournamentheld at Dunstable in June 1309 at which 235 participants are recorded as beingpresent, including six premier earls with their retinues.⁶³ Tournaments were oftenheld as part of the wedding festivities of the aristocracy: Henry of Grosmont(d. 1361), one of the great patrons of tournaments and, appropriately, a foundermember of the Order of the Garter, held a splendid tournament at his castleat 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 joustsand preparations for tournaments. The household accounts of the young HenryBolingbroke (the future Henry IV) for 1391–2, for example, show him attendingtournaments at Waltham, Hertford, Kennington, and elsewhere. He had by thenan established reputation as one of the most gallant knights in Christendom inthe wake of his performance at the magnificent and prolonged tournament heldat St Inglevert in the marches of Calais in 1390.⁶⁵ Bolingbroke would have beenreared from childhood in these chivalric enterprises: his grandfather, the famousHenry of Grosmont (d. 1361), had left a reputation as a great jouster and as thecaptain for life of a group of knights who secured a licence to hold a yearly joust atLincoln;⁶⁶ Bolingbroke’s uncle was Thomas, duke of Gloucester (d. 1397), whocomposed a standard manual for devotees of the tournament—‘Ordinauncesand Fourme of fighting within Listes’. A whole service industry of followersand attendants, heralds and minstrels was engaged for the occasion. Londonmerchants made a killing, supplying arms, tents, pavilions, banners, expensiveliveries and collars and all the accoutrements of ‘power-dressing’ and ostentatiousdisplay. Theatrical performances would be staged to titillate the audience suchas the procession of masked knights and esquires to the church of St Paul’s inLondon on the eve of the four-day tournament held at Stepney in 1331 or thecompany of knights, dressed as the pope and twelve cardinals, who took onall comers at the jousts at Smithfield in 1343. Such occasions were certainly adrain on noble incomes. Thomas, lord Berkeley (d. 1361), knew as much fromexperience: in 1327 he spent at least £53 on three tournaments, while in thefollowing year his expense account on at least three further tournaments cost himat least £86 and a further £8 for armour for his body.⁶⁷ Expenditure on this scaleand with this regularity suggests that tournaments and jousts were not marginalor even optional activities for ambitious young aristocrats. Rather were they akey feature of their promotion of their self-image as a warrior elite and of theirhabits 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.

The Lord at War 137

Should the nobility feel that tournaments were too much like playing war gameswithout incurring the real risks of war, they could opt instead to participate in acrusade.⁶⁸ It was an opportunity for them to bring their military pretensions andtheir Christian convictions into practical alignment. The crusading enterprises ofHenry Bolingbroke are a case in point; they also show the continuum from theworld of the tournament through to that of the grand tour to participation in acrusade.⁶⁹ In 1390 Henry was twenty-four years old and had already establisheda reputation for himself as one of the most formidable jousters in Europe. He hadreturned from the international competition at St Inglevert covered in glory, andhe now searched for new worlds in which to boost his renown further. In this hewas probably encouraged, and certainly financed, by his father, quite possibly tobe out of England at a politically fraught time. Be that as it may, on 20 July 1390he set out with a company of 150–200 for Prussia on ‘crusade’, returning toEngland in April 1391. But his wanderlust had not been satisfied. Three monthslater he set out again for Prussia from King’s Lynn. His proposed crusade hadto be aborted; but Bolingbroke was not to be denied his chance to see the worldand to enhance his reputation. He set out via Vienna and Prague for Veniceand then travelled to Rhodes, Jerusalem, and Cyprus before heading back forEngland. 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 therange of their military activities to include the lands of the infidels. Bolingbroke’sgrandfather had distinguished himself at the siege of Algeciras in 1343 andwent to Prussia in 1351–2 with the intention of leading a campaign against theTurks. His near contemporary Humphrey de Bohun, earl of Hereford (d. 1373),campaigned in Prussia in 1363 and with Pierre de Lusignan in the Middle Eastin 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 calledupon to accompany one’s lord on a crusade was such an anticipated contingencythat it could be formally stipulated as an obligation of service in an indentureof retinue.⁷⁰

As we saw in the case of Henry Bolingbroke, it was not easy—nor indeedis it sensible—to draw a clear distinction between tournaments, crusades,pilgrimages, and travel in the cursus of the young aristocrat. They were activitieswhich merged easily and naturally into one another. They were an occasion forthese privileged young men and their entourages to see the world, to flaunt theirpower and wealth, to extend their horizons and contacts, to hone their militaryskills, 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 EnglishAristocracy 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’sExpeditions to Prussia in 1390–1 and 1392’, in The Reign of Richard II: Essays in Honour of MayMcKisack, ed. F. R. H. Du Boulay and C. M. Barron (London, 1971), 153–73.

⁷⁰ ‘Private Indentures’, nos. 14, 93.


the enterprises of a noble, military elite. We can perhaps best capture theircharacter through the pictorial representation of the career of one of the greataristocratic military heroes of the early fifteenth century, Richard Beauchamp,earl of Warwick (d. 1439). Earl Richard inaugurated his distinguished militarycareer at the age of twenty in an unpromising theatre—in the wars in Wales. By1408 the threat from Owain Glyn Dwr had largely ebbed away. So Earl Richardfelt free to travel abroad for two years, performing notable feats of arms at Veronaand elsewhere, visiting Rome and the Holy Land, Russia and Poland. ‘And in thisJurney,’ comments his later biographer, ‘Earl Richard gate hym greet worschipat many turnaments and other faites of warre.’⁷¹ He returned, no doubt, with hishorizons extended and his reputation enhanced. He had completed his militaryapprenticeship; ahead of him would lie exemplary years of service for Henry Vand Henry VI in France. The career of Earl Richard was more rounded andmore successful than that of most great aristocrats; but in the centrality thatmilitary prowess and activity—in the tournament, on campaign, on crusade, inhis castle building, in his travels—he was at one with most of the noblemen ofhis day.⁷²


For the commemoration of a particular warrior, D. Green, Edward the BlackPrince: Power in Medieval Europe (Harlow, 2007), ch. 4. For individual battlesand campaigns, C. J. Rogers, War Cruel and Sharp: English Strategy underEdward III, 1327–60 (Woodbridge, 2000); D. Green, The Battle of Poitiers,1356 (Stroud, 2002); A. Ayton and Sir P. Preston, Bart., The Battle of Crecy,1346 (Woodbridge, 2005); A. Curry, Agincourt: A New History (Stroud, 2005).The retinue roll of Lionel of Antwerp, earl of Ulster, for his Irish expeditionof 1361–4 [TNA E 101/28/18] is published in Appendix 2 of Handbook andSelect Calendar of Sources for Medieval Ireland in the National Archives of theUnited Kingdom, ed. P. Dryburgh and B. Smith (Dublin, 2005). For the earlof Arundel’s recruitment of troops in the reign of Richard II, A. R. Bell, Warand the Soldier in the Fourteenth Century (Woodbridge, 2004). For the Englisharistocracy 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 theWelsh Wars of Edward I to the Battle of Bannockburn (Woodbridge, 2008). For themilitarism of Cheshire, T. Thornton, ‘Cheshire: The Inner Citadel of RichardII’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 ofWarwick, 44.

⁷² ODNB sub ‘Beauchamp, Richard’.

The Lord at War 139

For chivalry in the context of the Anglo-Scottish wars, A. King, ‘War andPeace: 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: Essaysin Honour of Michael Prestwich, ed. C. Given-Wilson, A. Kettle and L. Scales(Woodbridge, 2008); A. J. Macdonald, Border Bloodshed: Scotland and England atWar, 1369–1403 (Edinburgh, 2000). For Scotland more generally, K. Stevenson,‘ ‘‘Thai War Callit Knychtis and Bere the Name and the Honour of that HyeOrdre’’: Scottish Knighthood in the Fifteenth Century’, in The Fifteenth CenturyVI: 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, theessays in The World of the Galloglass: Kings, Warlords and Warriors in Ireland andScotland, 1200–1600, ed. S. Duffy (Dublin, 2007), esp. K. Nicholls, ‘ScottishMercenary 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 andthe English World in the Late Middle Ages: Essays in Honour of Robin Frame, ed.B. Smith (Basingstoke, 2009).

5Land, Family, and Marriage

Family and land were two of the central features around which conceptsof standing, status, and power were built in medieval rural societies. This wasarguably true of all orders of society above the ranks of the landless, labourers, andvagrants. Peasant society, it is now widely acknowledged, was in many respectsan assemblage of family units. It was the family which was often the primarysocial and economic organism. It was the unit of production, consumption, andseigniorial obligation. Its customs of inheritance, and the conventions whichdetermined claims to its land and chattels between widows and children, formedthe framework for the distribution and inheritance of property, especially atdeath. Land was also the means to, and the guarantor of, status. It was interms of the amount of land that he held that the medieval peasant was oftenidentified—virgater, half-yardlander, bovate-holder, and so forth. Ownership ofland also made him a fully fledged member of the village community with all therights and duties—including a share in communal agriculture, use of commonmeadow and pasture, access to woods, forest, and turbary—that this couldentail. The hierarchies of landed wealth and the accumulation, transmission,and inheritance of land were paramount features of peasant status and lifecycles.

What was true of peasant society applied equally, if not more so, to theother orders of society. Particularly did it apply to the greater aristocracy. Wewill misunderstand their priorities and concerns if we overlook the degree towhich their policies were regularly preoccupied by the issues of land and family.Furthermore many of the documents which they carefully preserved in theirarchives, copied into their cartularies, and bequeathed to their descendants wereconcerned with these very issues. For the historian this is both a strength anda weakness. From these documents it is often possible to glimpse the strategieswhich families deployed to protect and enhance their landed fortunes andfamily interests. Most of these documents were carefully drafted by lawyers.They are precise and technical, and grow steadily more so across the periodstudied in this book. They have been the subject of excellent detailed studies,notably on issues such as entails, jointures, marriage contracts, settlements intail male, and enfeoffments to use—all of them devices developed to extendthe family’s control over its lands and its transmission from one generation to

Land, Family, and Marriage 141

the next.¹ It is not the aim of the present chapter to summarize this vast andtechnical body of historiographical comment except in so far as a brief review,accompanied by some selected examples, can help us to identify the approach ofthe aristocracy to issues of land and family. It is precisely in that area that webecome aware of the limitations of the evidence. Abundant it may be, but it isalso deliberately technical and formulaic. It is very rare indeed—at least untilwe enter the much better-documented world of private correspondence in thefifteenth century—that we are given a glimpse of the personal considerationsand passions which shaped the decisions which underlie the bloodless languageof the legal documents. Nor is it always easy to separate social reality from legalfiction in many of these documents.

But even when we have conceded as much, it is abundantly clear that land andfamily lay at the heart of the aristocracy’s ambitions. In England at least—lessso 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 jewelsfor a lady or the tools of agriculture (wainage) for the peasant. This is vividlydemonstrated in the territorial provision that Edward III made when he createdsix new earls in 1337. Thus in elevating William Clinton to be earl of Huntingdonin that year, the king gave him land and rent worth one thousand marks annuallyso that ‘he could more properly continue and better sustain the status and honourof earl’.² Honours and titles were all very well, but the medieval period tooka down-to-earth view of both. Only the possession of land and rents and thecontrol of people gave a meaningful content to aristocratic lordship.

Land, therefore, was the source of wealth and power; it was also the focus offamily tradition and family ambition. It is true that a common distinction wasdrawn between inherited land (an estate which had descended to an individualthrough his/her place in the family tree and whose transmission to the nextgeneration was largely determined by convention and custom) and acquired land(an estate which an individual had secured—or ‘purchased’ in the contemporaryphrase—by purchase, marriage, or exchange and was his, therefore, theoreticallyto dispose of as he wished). But even this distinction, in so far as it was appliedin practice, could only last for one generation, since the ‘acquired’ land of onegeneration became the ‘inherited’ land of the next. Land was in effect held intrust 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 EnglishFeudalism, 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 andSociety, ed. R. H. Britnell and A. J. Pollard (Stroud, 1995), 21–49; idem, ‘The Economics ofMarriage in Late Medieval England. The Marriage of Heiresses’, Econ. HR, 54 (2001), 413–29.

² Holmes, Estates, 4 n.1.


as the family’s coat of arms and its profound attachment to its ‘name’ and lineageexpressed its anxiety to display, confirm and, if necessary, invent and embellish itscontinuity 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 thebrass 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 theirpride since they can be shown, from independent historical evidence, to havebeen 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 fullfamily chronicle), genealogies, and carefully assembled collections of title deedsall of them proclaimed the emphasis on the continuity of great families.⁴

In fact few of the really great aristocratic families showed a somnolentcontinuity over time. Some families—the Courtenay earls of Devon are a well-known example—showed a remarkable stability over several generations; butthat was more a comment on their lack of enterprise, character, and success.More commonly—and much more so among great magnate families rather thancounty gentry—the territorial fortunes of families fluctuated, sometimes wildly,from one generation or even one decade to the next. A fortunate marriage ora handsome royal gift or the windfalls of an unexpected failure of heirs in afamily or even the investment of the gains of war could all transform a family’schances dramatically and unexpectedly. But so, in reverse, could a major politicalblunder or the sudden extinction of direct male heirs of the male line. In this, asin other respects, the swings of fortune and misfortune were more dramatic intheir 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 thefourteenth century are unusually vivid and partly because the survival of a familycartulary and chronicle and scattered family muniments help to illuminate thestory.⁵ In 1272 the Mortimers could look back on almost two centuries as lords ofWigmore (Herefordshire) and nearby Welsh lordships. They were a rumbustiouslot and had been ruthless frontier barons but on the whole they looked as if theywould have to be content with their long-accustomed role as Herefordshire andMarcher barons, and no more. Over the next century this situation was to bedramatically transformed and they were catapulted into the very front rank of theEnglish aristocracy. The routes to success were many, but two in particular canbe 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.


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 grantsto the latter Roger, now flaunting the newly invented title earl of March, inthe minority years of Edward III (1327–30); and finally by the extraordinarilygenerous, if high-handed, acts of Edward III in rebuilding the Mortimer fortunesalmost completely in the 1350s for the next Earl Roger (d. 1360).

The second route to the transformation of the family’s fortunes and standinglay through the spoils of marriage. Indeed the two routes were linked in as muchas royal consent, and even direct royal intervention, were essential pre-requisitesfor success in the major marriage stakes. We may again select two examples fromthe annals of the family to illustrate the point. The first was the betrothal in1301 of the young Roger Mortimer, at the age of fourteen and during his father’slifetime, to Joan Geneville (or Joinville), only daughter and heir of Peter and Joande Geneville. Intense negotiations and calculations of possible consequences nodoubt preceded the contract. Over the next few years, the fruits of the marriagefell into the lap of the Mortimers: they included a major accession to the family’sstanding in the Welsh March (the lordship of Ewyas Lacy and a moiety ofLudlow) and a totally new stake in the English colony in Ireland (the lordships ofTrim and Meath). Even more spectacular in its import, and this time involvingdirect royal intervention, was the marriage of Earl Edmund Mortimer (d. 1381)in 1368 to Philippa, daughter of Lionel, duke of Clarence, and granddaughterof Edward III. Earl Edmund’s marriage had originally been promised to the earlof Arundel’s daughter; but when the king stepped in with his offer, the promiseto Arundel was cancelled on due payment of compensation.⁶ Few families couldresist the flattering offer of a royal marriage alliance. But flattery apart, the 1368marriage quickly brought very tangible rewards for the Mortimers. Philippa wasthe heiress of Elizabeth de Burgh (d. 1360) and so brought to her new husbanda goodly part of the vast former Clare inheritance, including great lordshipsin south-east Wales, East Anglia, and Ireland. From being in 1301 a baronialfamily of sound but modest regional standing the Mortimers had become withinthree generations possibly the second richest aristocratic family in England, withestates stretching from East Anglia through southern England, a predominantposition in the March of Wales, and a towering position in the ranks of Englishmagnates in Ireland.

Presented in this fashion the story of the Mortimers from 1272 to 1398 wouldappear 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 disastroussetbacks. No one could predict from one generation—or indeed one decade—tothe next what the consequences might be of a political disaster, a childlessmarriage, the failure of male heirs, or the demands of successive widows—to

⁶ CCR 1354–60, 92–94; McFarlane, Nobility, 86 n. 3.


name but some of the most obvious contingencies. Such disasters could destroy afamily irretrievably, as happened to the cadet branch of the Mortimers of Chirkafter the death of Roger in 1326.⁷ But other families—including our Mortimersof Wigmore—recovered from their failures and disasters, partly because theyrelearnt the art of climbing the greasy pole of political success in each generationand—which is much the same thing—mastered the arts of winning the supportand patronage of the king. For the Mortimers the fourteenth century was a rollercoaster 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 theirfortunes was very much upwards. As was true of most aristocratic families, wealthand fortune seemed to attract more wealth and fortune.

The Mortimers had built up their territorial fortune through the enterprise ofindividual members of the family and the luck of a series of key marriages. Theirtask now was to secure the integrity of the inheritance and to prevent it beingdissipated by alienation and fragmentation. The assumptions of English land lawhelped them in this respect. Its inbuilt prejudice in favour of the eldest male heirof the body as the rightful expectant owner of his father’s lands was a powerfulforce in keeping the estate integral. So, at least formally, was the absence ofmeans by which land (outside boroughs) could be devised by will. We will, infact, see that there were various ways in which these limitations could be, andwere regularly, circumvented. But in the vast majority of cases the rights of theeldest surviving son to succeed to the family estates, or at least the greater bulk ofthem, were respected. Sometimes, indeed, the integrity of the estate was formallyprotected against the indigence or extravagance of the father in the interests ofthe son. Thus when in May 1316 the powerful Bartholomew de Badlesmerestruck a marriage agreement with Robert Fitz Pain, he insisted that the lattershould have no power to alienate any of his land (beyond £200 worth) withoutBartholomew’s consent. Bartholomew was thereby protecting the interests of hisdaughter (who was betrothed to Robert’s son) but he was also ensuring that hisfuture 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 builtup over the generations might be dissipated and fragmented by often totallyunforeseen events, both natural and man-made. They had good reason to be veryapprehensive about the issue. In a famous calculation—which broadly stands inspite of subsequent reservations and qualifications—K. B. McFarlane estimatedthat a quarter of his sample baronial families became extinct in the direct maleline every twenty-five years during the period 1300–1500.⁹ It is little wonderthat 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.


best they could with such a contingency. Indeed it was but one of a galaxy ofconcerns which disturbed the sleep of any self-respecting aristocrat. How couldthe consequences of a long minority and the depredations which often camein the wake of a royal custody be mitigated, if not altogether avoided? Whatabout the claims of widows, cadets, and collaterals? When should the affectionone naturally felt for daughters who happened to be heirs make way for thesuperior claim of maintaining the integrity of the family inheritance? How couldone 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 practicesand legal devices on which the whole aristocracy could, in principle draw. Muchthe same sets of practices and devices also prevailed in much of lowland Scotlandand in English Ireland, in other words in areas which were, albeit at one removeand often with their own distinctive technical vocabulary (e.g. tailzie for an estatein tail in Scotland),¹⁰ within the orbit of the English common law tradition. Themain 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 away which both preserved the integrity of the estates and respected the owner’swishes 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 tothe wishes of its current lord in determining its descent. It was no longer heldin 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 andwardship) and that the right of the primogenitary heir determined succession.The landholder—provided he had secured a royal licence—could use the entailto determine the descent of his inheritance in accordance with his wishes. Therewere many possibilities—including specifying a sequence of remainders (i.e.indicating to which member of a family the land should descend in the eventof the failure of the designated heir(s) or his direct descendants), preferringmale collaterals to daughters or claimants through the female line, or excludingcollaterals as prospective heirs at the time of a marriage contract (as happenedwhen Thomas, earl of Lancaster (d. 1322), took the daughter and heir of the earlof Lincoln (d. 1311) as his wife in October 1294).¹¹ Since family circumstancesand the wishes of individual magnates varied widely there is no general pattern tothese 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 toillustrate 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.


families. Perhaps the best known and most comprehensive such settlement wasthat made by Thomas Beauchamp, earl of Warwick (d. 1369) in 1344–5 whenhe devised the bulk of his estates to himself and to his eldest son jointly, withremainders to younger sons and provisions for his daughters’ dowries.¹² Theprovisions had to be revised several times to take account of deaths (includingthat of his eldest son) and other changes in family circumstances. ThomasBeauchamp’s entail arrangements were even-handed as between his children,those of other magnates less so. Richard Fitzalan, earl of Arundel (d. 1376) wasa shrewd and ruthless operator. Having ditched his first wife since he regardedher now as a political embarrassment, he made three separate entails of differentportions of his estate—at the time of his second marriage in 1345 to the daughterof the earl of Lancaster, then in 1347 when this marriage produced a son, andfinally in 1366 to lock in the Warenne inheritance (which had descended to him)with the Arundel fortunes. Ralph Neville, earl of Westmorland (d. 1425), wasto follow much the same route in his family settlements and to show the samedegree of ruthlessness.¹³

Shrewd family calculations informed all such settlements. Keeping the inher-itance—or at least the main part of it—intact was a basic desideratum, andpreferably in the direct male line. The Beauchamp family once more providedtwo highly instructive instances. Earl Thomas (d. 1369), as we have seen, engin-eered a series of arrangements to determine the descent of the family lands andto give a good start in life to all his children. But he had not bargained forthe ruses of the Great Reaper. Three of his five sons predeceased him. But EarlThomas was not to be thwarted. A fourth son, William (d. 1411), was alreadymarked out for an ecclesiastical career, no doubt eventually a bishopric; he wasalready canon of Salisbury. But the continuity of the family took precedence overecclesiastical convictions and scruples. He was retrained as a soldier and a valuableportion of the Beauchamp inheritance was given to him and his heirs male. Itwas a calculated insurance policy—that of establishing a credible cadet branchof the family against the possibility that the remaining Beauchamp heir Thomas(d. 1401) might, like his three other brothers, die prematurely and without a maleheir of the body. In the event, the reverse happened: it was Richard Beauchampson of William Beauchamp (recently created earl of Worcester) who died in 1422without a son. The Beauchamp instinct for reintegrating the family inheritancenow swung remorselessly, and probably uncanonically, into action. The widowof Richard Beauchamp (d. 1422) was married to his namesake and cousin,Richard Beauchamp earl of Warwick (d. 1439) in November 1423. What forus is instructive is the shaft of light that a whole series of marriages, deaths, andsettlements 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.


and settlements could have totally unforeseen long-term consequences; familiesworked out strategies which maximized the opportunities of all its members butnever lost sight of the overriding priority of family solidarity (where it could beachieved) and the continuity of the family inheritance; the cadet branch couldeasily become the senior residuary legatee of family plans in one generation onlyto find the boot on the other foot in the next.

The bias of these settlements—and increasingly so as our period pro-gresses—was in favour of male heirs, preferably of the body. Medieval aristocraticEngland was not an agnatic society, in the sense that medieval Wales was, exclud-ing formally all claims to landed property by females or through the female line.The prominent role played by widows, dowagers, daughters, and other femaleheiresses makes that evident enough.¹⁴ Nevertheless the advantages of unilinealmale descent were obvious in a society anxious to preserve the family nameand the integrity of the inheritance. Interestingly, perhaps some of the mostforthright statements of this credo come from Scotland and Ireland. These weresocieties where clan or family leadership in peace and war-captaincy in regionsof frequent warfare reinforced the preference for male inheritance. The charterof entail for the barony and castle of Dalkeith did not mince its words on thisscore. The barony was to be entailed to male heirs; failing such heirs it wasto pass to the next male heirs bearing the surname Dalkeith. And in case thepoint was not sufficiently explicit it was decreed that no descent to a femaleheir was to be permitted unless male heirs were totally lacking.¹⁵ It was anattitude that would have been fully understood in English Ireland. In 1299 thebarony 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 ofRochfordeyn . . . to whom the whole barony . . . shall remain indivisible, so thatthe inheritance shall never pass to daughters’. That statement enunciated a setof principles in an uncompromising form which any English or indeed Scottishmagnate family would have understood.¹⁶

Another device which greatly extended a landowner’s control of the descentof his lands—and helped him avoid feudal inheritance law—lay in the trust orenfeoffment to use. It may well have been developed among gentry landownersin the late thirteenth century, but it was in the period after 1350 that it seems tohave been widely practised among leading aristocratic landowners. It is possiblybest illustrated by a concrete example rather than by a theoretical exposition ofits legal possibilities. The history of the Mortimer estates serves us well oncemore. 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 andPolitics: 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. Otherexamples are cited in Frame, English Lordship in Ireland, 23–4.


(d. 1360) demised a goodly proportion of his estates to a group of friends andcouncillors headed by the bishop of Winchester, William Wykeham.¹⁷ The grantmeant that the title to the estates was now vested formally not in the earl butin the feoffees as they were called, provided they observed the conditions onwhich the grant was made—often involving paying an annual fee farm to thefeoffor. On his death—and in the case of Earl Roger death followed within oneyear of the enfeoffment—the feoffees would run the estate in accordance withthe feoffor’s (or late magnate’s) wishes as expressed in the enfeoffment and/orhis will. Side by side with the entail, the enfeoffment to use was a crucial devicein shaping the descent and status of a magnate’s estate after his death. Therewere doubtless a variety of complex motives behind the adoption of uses, bothnegative (to avoid the consequences of a prolonged period of royal custody) andpositive (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 involveare those specified in the will of Hugh, earl of Stafford who died on pilgrimage toRhodes in 1386: to guarantee the lands and rents given to his servants for theirlives; to provide a dowry for his daughter; and to provide an annuity for eachof his younger sons.¹⁸ In short it was as much a means of upholding a familysettlement as it was a way of avoiding the ‘death duties’ of feudal tenure.

Entails and enfeoffments to use were parts of the legal paraphernalia thatwere developed, especially in the fourteenth century, to cope with the wish ofaristocratic landowners to exercise as much control as possible over the descentand transmission of the family inheritance. Preserving the name of the family,retaining the integrity of the inheritance, preferring generally the establishedclaims of the eldest surviving male heir and ensuring, in so far as possible, that thewishes of the owner continued to shape decisions after his death were certainlyamong 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, andhe needed to balance these considerations against one another. Working outthat equation amicably and effectively was a major challenge to his talent andingenuity.

Top of the list of claims on the magnate’s generosity was the need to makeprovision for his wife, especially in anticipation that he would predecease her andshe would survive him as a widow for years. Conventional practice stipulatedthat 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 landsto her on the marriage as a maritagium, further consolidating her claim; but thispractice had largely been replaced by the grant of a marriage portion to the bride’sfather, a practice to which we will return. The really important developmentwas 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.


in survivorship for a landholder and his wife, stipulating which lands shouldbe held by joint title and which therefore would be held by whichever partylived the longer. Sometimes only a few manors were included in a jointurearrangement but occasionally the terms were extended to the greater part of aninheritance. The impact of dower portions and jointure settlements could havea 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 multipledowager ladies put in their claims more or less simultaneously. Earl Roger ofMarch (d. 1360) had his work cut out to salvage as much as he could of theMortimer lands forfeited by his grandfather and namesake (d. 1330); but his taskwas made all the more frustrating by the fact that three Mortimer widows—hisgreat-grandmother, his grandmother, and his mother—all had legitimate claimsto dower.¹⁹ It was not until 1358—two years before his own death—that he wasable to reassemble the whole of his fragmented inheritance. Jointure settlementsfurther complicated these contingencies. The example par excellence is of coursethat 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 hermale descendants out of the inheritance for the better part of sixty years. Thevagaries of the law of dower and the practice of jointure were not merely mattersof antiquarian legal interest; they profoundly affected the map of the distributionof landed wealth, and with it power, in medieval society. Nor was this a retiringgroup of ladies. On the contrary, what we know of them—of Joan of Bar, theestranged wife of the earl of Surrey, the thrice-widowed and immensely rich andshrewd 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 evenmore formidable Joan Beauchamp lady of Abergavenny (d. 1435)—proves thereverse to be the truth.²⁰ They managed their affairs and presided over theirfamilies with authority. They were hard-headed if not necessarily hard-hearted:when another Mortimer dowager, Philippa (d. 1378) left her son £500 in her willit 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 theactivities of her executors.²¹ Maternal affection was not to cloud her insistenceon her rights in these matters.

Family responsibility did not, of course, end with the claims of the wife orthe widow. Other members also had strong claims on the family’s affections andthereby 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 (farand away the best documented heiress of the fourteenth century) is F. A. Underhill, For Her GoodEstate: The Life of Elizabeth de Burgh (New York, 1999).

²¹ Nicholls, Wills, 98.


Mortimer, earl of March (d. 1398), was notably generous in this respect. Duringthe years 1394–8—that is on reaching his majority—he granted manors worthat least £160 to his young brother, Edmund, to which he later added the lordshipof Narberth. He also awarded his brother-in-law, Henry Hotspur, land worth100 marks.²² This was largesse indeed but not out of line with the practice ofthe Mortimers, and many other families, of looking after the interests of thefamily in general. This could be achieved by grants—often in tail male—oflands and rents; but other members of the family had to be content with a richecclesiastical plum in the lord’s gift. Edmund Mortimer (d. 1304) did not havethe wherewithal to provide land for his large family. Instead he nominated threeof 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 wereconsigned to nunneries as was Joanna Mortimer they were no doubt expectedto bring an endowment with them. If they were to be placed on the marriagemarket, the costs would be much higher and the negotiations often complex.But no self-respecting magnate could afford to opt out of his responsibilities inthis respect. We will return in a moment to the question of marriage settlementsand marriage strategies. Here we will be content to give a couple of examples ofhow great aristocrats discharged their responsibilities in this respect. HumphreyBohun, earl of Hereford (d. 1361), was hardly a representative example of theEnglish higher aristocracy. He was a retiring, sickly bachelor; but he also felthis responsibilities to his female kin, leaving bequests to his sisters and niecesin his will. His near contemporary Richard earl of Arundel (d. 1376) was easilythe richest magnate in England and could afford to shower his largesse liberallyamong family members—including bequests totalling 14,000 marks in cash tohis sons and daughters; a further 2,500 marks to four grandchildren; and 1,400marks to his nephews and nieces. Earl Richard could well afford to be hugelymagnanimous; but the circle of his family beneficiaries indicated the orbit offamily affection and obligation among the aristocracy generally.²⁴ It is not onlytheir complicated legal landed agreements which open a window on to theirworld of obligation and duty; so do their bequests and gift-giving. They werefamily patriarchs as well as the heads of landed inheritances.

Given the close intertwining of land and family in all sorts of directions, thesuccessful arrangement of the marriage of offspring, male and female, constitutedone of the most delicate and critical acts of lordship. It was an opportunity toforge 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 keptan 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.


fortunes of the stock exchange, and since both activities had a strong risk, both ofspectacular profit or devastating loss, attached to them, they inevitably dabbledin futures. John of Gaunt was, of course, in a particularly strong position in thebidding stakes. Like many other magnates he had calculated that the wardshipand 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, Margaretcountess of Norfolk. It was a long-term prospect but a very enticing one. SoGaunt purchased young John’s marriage from his grandmother in 1379 andsimultaneously the wardship from the earl of Northumberland. The young Johnwas now brought up in the duke’s household and there was every prospect thathe might be married to one of Gaunt’s daughters, relatives, or retainers.²⁵ It musthave been judged a shrewd move by Gaunt’s contemporaries; but the gambledid not pay off this time, since young John died early in 1383 still a minor. Butfor gambling men, occasional failures of this kind were not a deterrent. Nothingventured, nothing gained.

On the contrary, the competition for eligible partners for sons and daughterswas a consuming passion of most aristocratic families. Catching them young wasone way of settling the issue, even though betrothal between children was notcanonically 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 illustratethe point. Elizabeth, suo jure countess of Ulster (d. 1363), was betrothed tothe four-year-old Lionel of Clarence at the Tower of London on 9 September1342 when she was ten; their daughter Philippa (d. 1378) was betrothed at theage 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 towarn off alternative bidders. The king was, of course, particularly well placedto control such marriages to suit his tastes and policies. Edmund Mortimer wasindeed 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 IIIstepped into the process. Short of taking over an heir, a royal nod and a winkcould accelerate the completion of a marriage contract, so valuable was royalconsent. So it was that the king ‘ordained’ the marriage pact between thedaughter of the earl of Ormond and the son of the earl of Desmond in 1359.²⁶The problem with child marriages is that they could be challenged until theparties were fully of contractual age in the eyes of the church. The Cliffords hadgood cause to know that. They thought that they had secured the hand of therich heiress of Multon of Gilsland; but they were to be gazumped when RalphDacre came along citing a pre-existing contract between Thomas Multon andWilliam 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.


As the word ‘contract’ suggests, marriages or betrothals were only concludedafter long and detailed negotiations between the two families in question.They were no doubt drawn up after careful legal scrutiny and hard-headedbusiness discussions. Thus the proposed marriage of the sister of the earl ofStafford in 1391–2 involved the earl’s council in frequent journeys—includingto Nottingham, the New Forest, Bristol, and Newport in Wales—to discussthe matter among themselves and then with the council of the prospectivehusband, the earl of Kent.²⁸ One can imagine that great family conclaves wouldbe assembled, sometimes fraught with tension. In 1435/6 the earl of Warwick,his countess, and his household rode to Abergavenny (the home of Aunt JoanBeauchamp) to conclude the marriage of Anne, the earl’s sister, with LordDespenser.²⁹ It was the formidable and hugely experienced Margaret, countessof Norfolk, who led the negotiations for the marriage of her grandson, JohnHastings, heir to the earldom of Pembroke, to Philippa, daughter of the late earlof March (who was represented by the earl’s executors).³⁰

We sometimes catch a glimpse of the complicated issues which called fordiscussion and see the way in which a marriage alliance might be deployedto defuse an old problem. The Mortimer family provides us once again witha telling example. In 1354 it was, with active royal support, reassembling thegreat territorial fortune assembled by the first earl of March but lost in thedebacle of his downfall in 1330. Many of the families who had benefited fromthat debacle were now peremptorily deprived of their gains by royal fiat;³¹ butRichard Fitzalan, the great earl of Arundel (d. 1376), was too powerful—if onlyin respect of his credit operations—to be treated in such a way. He bargained tohang on to what he held and used marriage as a tool. He was allowed to retain thelordship of Chirk, which lay conveniently next to two existing Fitzalan Marcherlordships of Oswestry and Bromfield and Yale, even though Chirk had been ofthe inheritance of a cadet branch and subsequently of the senior branch of theMortimers. An inter-family deal was struck whereby Edmund, the two-year-oldMortimer heir, was betrothed to Alice, the daughter of the earl of Arundel.³²In the event the marriage did not take place; but this in no way reduces theinterest of the case in demonstrating the way marriages were deployed to buryfamily feuds. Occasionally the bond of marriage was extended to include a liferetainership. 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.


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 £2,800.³⁴It was a sum which would make a huge dent in any family’s income, and remainsso even if we make allowances for the jointures the daughters received from theirhusbands or in-laws. One way of limiting the costs and of solidifying the alliancesformed by marriage was to arrange a bilateral agreement, whereby the son ofone family married the daughter of another family and vice versa. A strikingexample was the Clare–de Burgh marriage axis in the early fourteenth century,with its possibly wide-ranging implications for aristocratic territorial fortunesin England, Wales, and Ireland. On 29 September 1308 Maud, one of thedaughters of Richard de Burgh, earl of Ulster (d. 1326), was betrothed to Gilbertde Clare, the young and powerful earl of Gloucester (d. 1314); on the next day atWaltham abbey and in the king’s presence John, at that date the surviving eldestson of the earl of Ulster, was married in the king’s presence to Elizabeth, youngGilbert de Clare’s youngest sister and, eventually, heiress of much of both thede Burgh and de Clare inheritances. It is but one of several examples that couldbe cited. In 1343 John lord Mowbray married his eldest son to the daughterof the earl of Salisbury and, as part of the arrangement, Salisbury’s eldest sontook Mowbray’s daughter to be his wife. The earls of Arundel and Northamptonmade 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 thefamily and its fortunes a central aspect of all marriages—the size of portions andjointure settlements. Stated baldly, the portion was the sum, normally in cashand often payable in instalments, paid by the groom’s father or kinsman to thebride’s father or guardian. Parallel with the grant of the portion, a jointure inrent income or land would be settled on the wife by the husband with reversionto him and his heirs, or on the new husband and wife jointly by the husband’sfather with similar reversion. Such complicated bilateral contracts were precededby extensive and no doubt occasionally very tense negotiations. The size of theportion does not seem to have been determined by any rigid formula but ratherby the relative power of the two families and by their anxiety to conclude anagreement. A very rich earl could display his wealth in the size of the portion hegave with his daughter: Richard Fitzalan (d. 1376) offered a portion of 4,000marks (£2,667) to his daughter Alice on her marriage to Thomas Holland in1364.³⁶ In English Ireland, portions might be paid in cattle: so it was that whenTheobald, the son of Walter de Burgh, took the daughter of the earl of Ormondas 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, 86n. 2.

³⁶ Reg. BP, III, 480.³⁷ Calendar of Ormond Deeds, 1172–1350, ed. E. Curtis, 6 vols. (Dublin, 1932–43), II, no. 353.


a reminder that a marriage contract was an occasion for the redistribution ofwealth, be it in cash, landed resources, or moveable goods.

Marriage was also an occasion for momentous decisions with regard to a wholedynasty’s wealth. Family conclaves were no doubt assembled and bargains struck.The affairs of the Mortimer family of Wigmore once again provide illustrativematerial. Towards midsummer 1316 Roger Mortimer (d. 1330) took time outfrom a busy military and political career to arrange the marriage of Edmund, hiseldest son, and to arrange the descent of his estates. On 9 May at his manorof Earnwood in Shropshire he struck an accord with Bartholomew Badlesmere,another powerful and rich baron and a key figure in the turbulent politics ofEdward II’s reign. It was a contract for the marriage of young Edmund toElizabeth, Badlesmere’s daughter. Badlesmere paid the handsome sum of £2,000for the marriage, which is a measure of his assessment of Mortimer’s standingand prospects. In return, Mortimer endowed the young bride with five valuablemanors 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 hispossessions in fee and reversion, with remainder to his right heirs—who wouldbe Edmund, Elizabeth, and their descendants, if they survived. Roger Mortimerand Bartholomew Badlesmere had taken the best legal advice possible and weredoing 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 wealthand standing, but this was by no means always the case. In that event the contractshowed the disparity of power. A week before concluding the Mortimer marriageagreement Bartholomew Badlesmere extracted much tougher conditions whenhe married another daughter, Maud, to Robert the son of Robert Fitz Pain.Badlesmere—‘dominus dives’, as he was appropriately described in the Mortimerfamily chronicle—gave the groom’s father a grant of 1,200 marks (£800) andensured that the daughter would have independent means by giving her landworth 200 marks (£167) per annum. He also arranged that after his death 200marks’ worth of her land should be bestowed on his son-in-law. Badlesmerewas clearly wielding his wealth to ensure a sound future for his daughter andson-in-law. But what perhaps showed best that he was in the driving seat wasthat Robert Fitz Pain the father was now debarred from alienating any of his ownland without Badlesmere’s permission and was required to convey three namedmanors and the revenue thereof to Maud Badlesmere and her new husband. Thiswas more a calculated takeover than a contract of equals.³⁹

Bartholomew Badlesmere had concluded the marriage contracts for his daugh-ters within a week of each other. It is a reminder to us that marriage policywas 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 agreementare discussed therein at 43–4.

³⁹ GEC, sub Fitz Pain.


of liquid wealth and landed assets and, often, a carefully considered plan forthe future of the family estates. Sometimes—as in the Badlesmere case—theplan was coordinated at a single point in time; more often, and of necessity, itwas put into operation piecemeal, as opportunities arose and children reachedmarriageable age. But whatever the tempo, marriage was a critical occasion inall aristocratic families for working out the relationships between land, familyobligation, political and personal alliances, and calculations of the family’s futuredirection. In this respect daughters could occupy an important role in a family’smarital strategy. Too often details of the marriage of daughters is difficult touncover. Here again the Mortimer family chronicle in its amplitude enablesus to see how the tentacles of a family spread through marriage. The first earlof 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 beenestablished 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 ElizabethBadlesmere. Four of the daughters married into the ranks of the higher Englisharistocracy—choosing the future earl of Pembroke, the earl of Warwick, LordAudley, and the son of Thomas of Brotherton earl of Norfolk as their husbands.The remaining three girls were deployed to consolidate Mortimer alliances andrelationships in western England and the Welsh March, the base of Mortimerpower. One was married to Thomas Berkeley, another to Sir Piers Grandison ofAshperton (Herefordshire), and the third to John Charlton of Powys.⁴⁰ Thereis every reason to believe that these marriages were carefully assessed for theirdynastic and, possibly, political impact. Aristocratic history is the story of greatnoble dynasties. To do any kind of justice to a family’s ambitions we need tobear in mind not only the descent of the main and the cadet branches but alsothe 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 lackof it, for the fourteenth century. What we have for the most part are the factsof marriage and, much less frequently, the formal legal contract. What we donot have, as we have for the age of the Pastons and the Stonors, are the letterswhich reveal the negotiations, pressure, and cross currents which must have beena recurrent feature of marriage diplomacy in all ages. Legal documents maximizethe assumption that marriages were carefully calculated business arrangements inwhich the views of the couple to be married are subsidiary to family policy andambition. That may have been true in many cases; and in other cases the twoconsiderations were brought into some sort of rough alignment, whether underduress or persuasion. But not always. Personality and will were also elements inthe equation. The awesome Edward I learnt that to his cost when his headstrongdaughter, Joan of Acre, in effect eloped with a landless young courtier, RalphMonthermer. Joan’s first marriage in 1290 to the earl of Gloucester (almost

⁴⁰ Dugdale, Monasticon, VI, I, 352.


thirty years her senior) had been a classic example of using a young daughter asa bargaining chip in Edward I’s dynastic schemes.⁴¹ She was not to be fobbedoff with a greybeard the second time and so confronted her father with a faitaccompli by marrying Ralph Monthermer. It must have been the talk of thetown, indeed of the kingdom. Edward was beside himself with fury; but therewas little he could do except explode. He had been trumped. He was not theonly father to be trumped by a determined child. Almost a century later thegreat 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 ofPembroke (d. 1375). More important, the son of the heir to the earldom waspledged to marry Gaunt’s daughter, Elizabeth. It was a neat arrangement: Gauntcould claim that he was ‘next friend’ to the young heir and had ‘great tendernessfor the inheritance’. But fair words are no match for a lady’s will. As the recordputs it, ‘Elizabeth has now disagreed to the marriage and is married elsewhere, sothat the alliance is terminated.’ And that was that.⁴²

Daughters could be awkward; so no doubt could fathers and other members ofthe family. Their awkwardness sometimes exploded into the records and remindsus that passion as well as calculation were elements in the marital equation. Letus return briefly to the family of the earl of Pembroke (d. 1375). When JohnHastings left on a continental venture in 1372 he had no heir of his body. Whatpersonal bitterness and/or affection at that time persuaded him to disinherithis heir general (Reginald Grey of Ruthin) and to divert his landed fortunesto Sir William Beauchamp, his cousin on the distaff side (their mothers weresisters)?⁴³ And there are other examples where the right heirs by law were doneout of an estate by the whims of a family patriarch. Indeed the Greys of Ruthinwere the beneficiaries of such a family quarrel. On the death of Sir John Grey in1323 the extensive Grey inheritance would normally have devolved to his elderson Henry. But there seems to have been a mighty falling-out between father andson because in 1311 the father granted a large part of the estates (including thelordship of Ruthin and thirty-one manors) to the younger son Roger, therebyinaugurating the line of the Greys of Ruthin. The elder brother did not take thisbrutal disinheritance lying down; he harassed his brother, and laid siege to Ruthincastle. 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 strik-ing was the disinheritance of Sir William Cantelou of Ravensthorpe (Yorkshire).Sir William’s father, Nicholas, married twice and it may well be that it wasthe ambitious nature of the second wife which prompted the explosive familysettlement in 1354. Nicholas in effect settled his estate on himself and on hissecond wife with remainders not to William (his heir by his first wife) but tothe 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.


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


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, Rulerof England, 1327–30 (London, 2003); P. Dryburgh, ‘Roger Mortimer and theGovernance of Ireland, 1317–20’, in Ireland and the English World in the LateMiddle Ages: Essays in Honour of Robin Frame, ed. B. Smith (Basingstoke, 2009).For entails, J. Biancalana, The Fee Tail and the Common Recovery in MedievalEngland (Cambridge, 2001); M. Prestwich, Plantagenet England, 1225–1360(Oxford, 2005), ch. 15.

For female inheritance in Ireland, G. Kenny, Anglo-Irish and Gaelic Womenin Ireland c.1170–1540 (Dublin, 2007), ch. 2. For revealing case studies of,respectively, Margaret de Lacy (d. 1266), and Isabel de Mortimer, widow ofJohn Fitzalan III (d. 1272), including their role as estate managers, L. Wilkinson,Women in Thirteenth-Century Lincolnshire (Woodbridge, 2007), ch. 1, andE. Cavell, ‘Aristocratic Widows and the Medieval Welsh Frontier: The ShropshireEvidence’, TRHS 6th ser., 17 (2007). For more general treatment, P. Fleming,Family and Household in Medieval England (Basingstoke, 2001) and for a slightlylater 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.

6The Sinews of Aristocratic Power

By the time we reach the chronological focus of this study (1272–1422) manyof the powers of lordship—like those of kingship—had been regularized androutinized. As contractual relationships were increasingly defined in writing, sothe loose uncoordinated powers of an earlier period were replaced by a muchmore closely defined range of powers. Furthermore the richness of seigniorialdocumentation from c.1250 now allows us to see lordship in action routinely andregularly. 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. Twopreliminary observations should be made. First, lordship was hugely variable inits range and impact. It operated within the geographical, economic, and socialcontext in which it found itself. In much of lowland British Isles—includingparts of Wales, Scotland, and Ireland—it functioned at a small-scale and oftenintensive manorial level; at the other end of the scale in many parts of uplandBritain it was little more than a loose, occasional superioritas. Thus in the lordshipof Glamorgan the contrast between the intensive lordship of the lowland manors(both those held directly by the lord, such as Roath, and those subinfeudated tohis followers, such as Sully) and the loose tributary, lordship claimed over thepatriae (as they were significantly termed) or commotes of the upland was sharp.¹It is a contrast which can be replicated in almost every part of the British Isles.²Part of our intention is to try to encompass this whole range of lordship withinour analysis.

The second prefatory comment relates to the term lordship. All those whoexercised a measure of control over others practised lordship. They calledthemselves ‘lords’ and often added the term as a status designation to theirnames. 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 andSociety, 86–89.

² The studies of Adrian Empey of the nature of English lordship in lowland Ireland are particularlyilluminating in this respect. See esp. ‘The Norman Period, 1185–1500’, in Tipperary: History andSociety, ed. W. Nolan (Dublin, 1985) and ‘Conquest and Settlement: Patterns of Anglo-NormanSettlement 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.

The Sinews of Aristocratic Power 159

continuum in the nature of lordship from that of the single-manor squire to thatof one of the great magnates of the land. But it is with aristocratic lordship, ratherthan 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 unitsof property and of 49 demesne manors.³ He would not have been personally ordirectly involved in the exercise of lordship at the local level in these units. Heoperated on an altogether grander scale of power and lordship, even if ultimatelyhis ability to do so was grounded in the control that his agents exercised over thelocal units of lordship. It is also—as we have frequently insisted—partly a matterof documentation. Whatever its deficiencies, the range and variety of availabledocumentation from c.1250 allows us to glimpse the scale and multifacetedcharacter of aristocratic lordship in a way which is not possible for earlier periodsor lesser lords. Finally, whatever the common features of all lordship, aristocraticlordship was in a league of its own in the powers that it could aggregate, inthe role that it could and did play at national, regional, and county level, andin its capacity to shape the dynamics of power in medieval society. It may be apardonable exaggeration to claim that ‘the great magnates ruled the England oftheir day’; but their role as a group needs to be analysed in all its complexity andrange.⁴

Aristocratic power in late medieval society was normally measured in terms oflanded wealth and income and in the range of powers that lords exercised overthose who lived on the land. But in an overview of lordship in the BritishIsles 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, orhad been, payable to lords in respect of their control and authority over theirmen.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 seigniorialpower in European society we will find them not in the ownership of landbut in charismatic and military leadership, in village or kin chieftainship, andin the protection that the powerful (potentes) could extend to the unprotected(pauperes). Likewise if we are to trace the history of what dependants owed tolords 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 landedaspect of the powers of lordship came increasingly to the fore. But in any roundeddiscussion of late medieval lordship in Britain we cannot afford to overlook theelements of its prehistory which had shaped its character.

This is so for at least two reasons. First, late medieval lordship was alwaysmore, 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.


been to reduce it to the latter and to measure its impact and range in financialand territorial terms. In fact lordship remained the lordship of men (howevermuch some of its powers had been appropriated by royal and state authorities).It was the power of command, jurisdiction, control; it involved the leadershipof men at all social levels; it exercised rights of discipline, grace, protection, andfavour which have been appropriated by state authorities and declared to be‘public’ rights in modern society. These powers were grounded in the history oflordship as an ancient institution; they still coloured its character—albeit moreanaemically at least in southern and midland England—in the later MiddleAges. It is the range of these powers which we will attempt to capture in thesubsequent discussion.

The second reason for opening the discussion with what we may term by wayof shorthand ‘tributary lordship’ is that the evidence for such lordship even infourteenth-century Britain is far more extensive than is normally acknowledgedby historians. Historiographical discussion of central and late medieval lordshiphas drawn overwhelmingly on detailed English regional, county, and manorialstudies. But if we cast our nets more widely geographically—to include muchof upland northern England, most of inland Wales, the west and Highlandsof Scotland, and most even of English Ireland outside the islands of manoriallordship—we encounter a very different image of the contours and character oflordship. Bringing these areas into the field of discussion is not merely a matterof rectifying the balance geographically within the British Isles; it also, crucially,allows us to chart some of the critical developments in the evolution of lordshipover the centuries. In other words, history and geography connive to encourageus to take a broad view of the character of lordship in the British Isles in themedieval period.

What then were the features of ‘tributary lordship’ and what traces did it leavein the late medieval evidence? Let us take the evidence of the detailed survey ofthe 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 opensa window on to a seigniorial world which had long since vanished in much oflowland England and even Scotland but which reveals to us vividly the characterof early lordship in much of the British Isles. What we find in essence is a massivepurveyance network in which kings and lords—the distinction between the twois easily overdrawn—were sustained by renders from their dependants. Many ofthese renders were biennial or triennial communal grants of livestock, normallyin cows (the common economic coin of a pastoral society). In this respect thecommorth Calan Mai (the cattle subsidy of 1 May) of Wales corresponded closelyto the cornage, horngeld, nontgeld, and other dues so common in the fournorthern counties of England and in north Lancashire, the cain which was to befound 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).


his lordship’, or the collective levies of cattle which are such a feature of powerrelationships in Gaelic and English Ireland.⁷ Alongside these communal tributeswere a host of other renders and dues which were also tributary, rather thanlanded, in character. Such were the hospitality rent, or conveth as it was knownin Scotland and wayting in Lothian—the right of a lord, his officers, and hisretinue to hospitality and lodging from his men and dependants. Such also werethe food rents, often payable once or twice a year, collected from free and unfreedependants alike according to different formulae. All these are fully itemizedin the Denbigh Survey of 1334 and in other comparable surveys. As EdmundSpenser was to observe of Ireland in the late sixteenth century, they constitutedthe 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 laterMiddle 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 scopeof medieval lordship. They were communal and personal, not territorial, incharacter. They were collected from individuals, kin-groups, and communitiesrather than being rent on land. As a shrewd early Stuart observer of the Welshborderlands noted, they were not ‘properely rent issueinge out of land but only asome of money annexed as a Royaltie to my Lordes person’.⁹ The comment has athree-fold significance for us. First, it draws no fundamental distinction betweenso-called royal and non-royal lordship; both were lordships, both were personaland, at one level, both were ‘royal’. Secondly, the observer’s astonishment registershis awareness that the perception and practice of lordship ran the whole gamutfrom the personal and tributary to the territorial. Thirdly, it is in the context oftributary lordship that we can best understand the range of judicial, disciplinary,protection, and command powers which still characterize late medieval lordshipand distinguish it sharply from the mere territorial power of the rent-collectinglandlord. 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 thepowers of lordship became increasingly territorialized. It was in the control ofland and income from estates and in the exploitation of those who lived on thoseestates that the powers of lordship were, literally and metaphorically, grounded.Land for the aristocracy was the source of wealth, power, and status. Nulle terresans seigneur, no land without a lord, declared the contemporary tag; but it was atag 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 andWelsh 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.


The twinning of land and lordship comes as no surprise. Landed wealth was theasset par excellence in medieval society; it was—for peasants and lords alike—thesource of status as well as of income. The later medieval aristocracy was pre-eminently a landed aristocracy. Noble titles could not be conferred without anappropriate landed endowment, with 1000 marks’ worth of land being regardedas the minimum ‘competence’ for an earl. It was on their landed estates, in theirparks and forests, and in their rural residences, as we have seen,¹⁰ that the highernobility levied and displayed their apartness. Wealth acquired from war, trade, orother means was immediately invested in land, for landed wealth was the sociallyacceptable measure of status. ‘By the size of his patrimony’, as a contemporaryobserved, ‘you may assess his power’ (my italics).¹¹ The descent of the patrimonialestates and the establishment of appropriate landed endowments for daughters,cadets, and dependants was—as we have seen—an abiding preoccupation of thearistocracy.¹²

Given the equation between land, lordship and power it was inevitable thatthe aristocracy took a keen interest in the land market. It was the most obviousway of enhancing their status and power, in other words their lordship. Of manyof 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 shouldinclude the immensely rich Richard Fitzalan, earl of Arundel (d. 1376), whospent at least £4,000 on purchasing manors in Sussex in the period 1350–70; thehighly successful war captain, William Bohun, earl of Northampton (d. 1360)who embarked on a systematic land-purchase policy in both Wales and Essexfrom his war winnings; the Beauchamps; and perhaps most spectacularly a seriesof northern families—including Percy, Neville, and Scrope—who transformedthe configuration of landed power in northern England during the fourteenthcentury.¹⁴ There is no single chronological or strategic pattern to such examples ofland purchase. They were dictated by individual circumstances and opportunities.Some aristocrats—such as Henry de Lacy, earl of Lincoln (d. 1311), or WilliamBohun of Northampton (d. 1360)—snapped up Cistercian lands as part oftheir investment in the wool trade; others, such as the earl of Arundel, boughtaggressively—both in Sussex and Shropshire—in order to broaden the basisof their standing in their own ‘country’; others seized on an opportunity topurchase lands to build up an endowment for a second family, as did John ofGaunt for John Beaufort at the expense of the heirless earl of Salisbury. Whateverthe 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.


way of enhancing their status, power, and standing. They followed the marketshrewdly and calculated their moves carefully. Even the great John of Gauntmoved with circumspection: when contemplating the purchase of land in Dorsetin 1372 he ordered his steward to find out the value of the land, to identifyany jointure or entailed interest in it, and in the meantime to be favourable andgracious to the owner.¹⁵

As the source of their wealth and status, the aristocracy had to exercise eternalvigilance in defending their title to their lands, especially recently acquired orinherited land. The accounts of the officers of the English aristocracy—Mortimer,Bohun, Stafford, Beauchamp, Lancaster among them—are eloquent and detailedon this score. Fees were paid to lawyers, attorneys, and justices; records (oftendating back more than a century) were transcribed; local juries and supporterswere ‘laboured’ and so were royal officials; food and drink were distributed andso were gifts; money was spent to buy off counter-claims; seigniorial councilsmet for days at a time to work out compromise settlements. The costs couldbe substantial, even for a man of John of Gaunt’s standing: on one occasionhe spent £46 on four serjeants; attorneys in all the major royal courts anddepartments; clerks, ushers, and scribes and the preparation of writs.¹⁶ Butthese were the sorts of costs which could not be avoided. The aristocracy wasrecurrently haunted by two spectres in respect of its landed title: the first was thevagaries of royal policy and whim which could so easily undo a family, especiallyin periods of political turbulence; the other were the loopholes which cleverlawyers could so easily exploit in a family’s titles. That is why for example theextraordinarily hard-headed business woman, Joan Beauchamp (d. 1435), ladyof 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 significanceof these disbursements—recurrent as they are—is how central the acquisitionand defence of its landed title was to the aristocracy. Its glory may have comefrom birth, noblesse, and military prowess; but its power was increasingly rootedin 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 questionwas how that land was to be exploited to the maximum advantage of the lord. Partof it, known to historians as bond-land or demesne, might be worked directlyfor the lord, exploiting the labour dues of tenants attached to the demesne. Inearlier centuries demesne production had been a crucial source of food supplyfor the lord, his household, and his entourage. Indeed, as we saw above,¹⁸ onthe estates of Elizabeth de Burgh (d. 1360) the produce of her manors—shewas 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 LegalCounsel, c.1275–c.1475’, TRHS, 5th ser., 35 (1985), 95–113.

¹⁷ Reg. Chichele, II, 534–8. ¹⁸ See above, pp. 107–8.


to make an important contribution to her household needs. But the glory daysof high demesne farming were coming to a close in the fourteenth century:the mechanisms of the market undermined its appeal; so did the increasinglyacute problems of the labour market and what John Smyth memorably referredto as ‘the soure and irksomenes of toile and hind servants’.¹⁹ Historians haveestablished that on most seigniorial estates in England and Wales, arable demesnefarming had gone into terminal decline c.1380–c.1420. It had become, in thewords of John of Gaunt’s auditors, ‘a dead loss’ (grande perte).²⁰ In fact, as wecan see from the full accounts of Elizabeth de Burgh’s estates for the 1330s,arable demesne faming—what contemporaries called ‘profit de la garnerie’—hadnever constituted a major source of income on aristocratic estates.²¹ Even so, thedemise of arable demesne exploitation was an important stage in the evolutionof medieval lordship. The lord and his officials were no longer directly involvedin the agricultural life of their estates, even of those few which were classified asdemesne; that was bound to change the nature of his relationship with those wholived on his estates.

But the aristocracy had not opted out of direct exploitation of their estatesaltogether. Rather did they shift the focus of their attention from arableagriculture—with all its attendant problems of management, labour, supervision,and marketing—to large-scale, pastoral, agriculture. Here the management andmarketing opportunities were much more favourable. The wool and clothindustries were remarkably profitable for most of the long fourteenth century;labour problems were at a minimum; the advantages of coordinated and integratedpolicies for the purchase and sale of livestock were self-evident. Lordship wasshifting from the intricacies of small-scale manorial production of cereals,embedded as it was in local circumstances and restrictions, to the advantagesof large-scale capitalist stock-farming on a national and even internationalscale. A few figures will indicate how the aristocracy had adjusted to the newopportunities and how in the process the nature of demesne lordship waschanging. Sheep farming (and, to a lesser extent, cattle breeding) was big businessfor many aristocrats. Elizabeth de Burgh had almost 5,000 sheep on her estatesin 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 15,430sheep on his Sussex lands alone in 1397.²² Furthermore these figures did notnecessarily decline over the passage of time: John of Gaunt was still purchasinglarge 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, EnglishSeigniorial Agriculture, 1250–1450 (Cambridge, 2000).


duke of York in 1411–12.²³ The whole business was organized on capitalistlines and extricated from the control of local officials. The earl of Salisbury,for example, had ‘a surveyor of husbandry and livestock’; as had Isabella deFortibus a century earlier.²⁴ Marketing was likewise organized on metropolitanor international lines: the wool of the Mortimer, Bohun, and Fitzalan flockswas sent in bulk to major London merchants; so were the more than 6,000fleeces of Elizabeth de Burgh from her Clare estates, and the 136 sacks of woolwhich Hugh Audley exported via the port of London.²⁵ Such policies—whichcan certainly be paralleled from other English aristocratic estates—were byno means altogether new; but they do show clearly that aristocratic demesnefarming was now fully adjusted to the demands of an international and nationalmarket and to the practices of capitalist agriculture. It was leaving behind itthe world of manorial lordship, local arable production for household andassociated needs, and the exploitation of the manorial and associated labourforce. It is an important stage in the evolution of late medieval aristocraticlordship.

Important as was demesne exploitation, it was in reality but a relativelysmall component of the income and power that the aristocracy derived fromits control of land. Rarely on lay estates did it exceed 20 per cent of the lord’sannual income; often it was far less. The major source of income was rent,broadly defined—including fixed rents (established by custom and normallynon-negotiable), sale and commutation of labour services (now virtually a formof 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 Elizabethde Burgh in the 1330s, however enterprising she was in exploiting both thearable and pastoral resources of the manors.²⁶ Even clearer is the outstandingevidence from the comprehensive list of the valors for the huge estates of Johnof Gaunt in the 1390s: they reveal that on average at least 80 per cent of thelanded revenue of the duke of Lancaster came from rents and leases, broadlydefined.²⁷ Nor does the situation seem to have been very different in those partsof lowland Scotland for which some fragmentary scraps of evidence survive. Thebulk 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 1435–6see 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.


and likewise the rental of James Douglas of Dalkeith for 1376–7 reveals thepredominance of rent.²⁸ When we look more closely at the evidence we willfind significant regional and local variations in the composition of seigniorialincome; we will also find that there was perhaps more to ‘rent’ than meets theeye. Yet it is still difficult to dissent from George Holmes’s conclusion that onlay estates—great ecclesiastical and particularly monastic complexes may havebeen different—‘rent dominated the economy . . . at all times in the fourteenthcentury.’²⁹ In that sense the aristocratic lords of England were now primarilyland -lords in terms of their regular income and the source of their lordship andpower. It was a far cry from the tributary lordship of earlier centuries and of theoutlying parts of the British Isles.

Yet we would be mistaken to conclude that the role of the lord has beenlargely confined to that of a rent collector, whose impact on his estates was littlemore than that of revenue-raising. When we peer beneath the externalities ofthe financial accounts, we find that the exploitative and disciplinary powers oflordship continued to penetrate deeply into the lives of the communities of theirestates. One area in which they notably did so was in what may be collectivelyclassified as communal, non-arable resources—notably forest, woodland, pasture,waste, and fisheries. Throughout Europe the struggle over the control of theseresources reverberated down the centuries, with an aggressive and predatorylordship pitched against conservative and defensive rural communities.³⁰

There was much at stake for both parties. For the local communities theseresources were not peripheral extras; they were central to the economic andecological balance of their subsistence. Particularly was this so for the uplandcommunities of the north and west of the British Isles. They relied on woodlandand pasture for their fuel and building materials, for pannage for their pigs, forthe 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 innorth-east Wales that ‘the greater part of their sustenance is derived from thewoods.’³¹ It was a comment which could have been echoed across much of thenorthern and western British Isles. It drew its force not only from arguments ofeconomic necessity but also from deep-rooted communal convictions that theseresources were indeed the God-given fruits of nature and rightfully belonged tothe community as a whole. That is why access to forest, pasture, waste, and riverfigure prominently in tussles between lords and communities across Europe andwere often codified in charters of liberties when the community had the whiphand; that is also why the first act of defiance of the community was to destroythe palisades and fences round the lord’s woods, to hunt in his forest, and ingeneral 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.


But equally lords were determined to consolidate and extend their powerover forest, pasture, and waste; and indeed there is no doubt that they didso successfully. They had many reasons for doing so. It was a growth pointof their lordship. The vast majority of revenue from rents and services wasfixed, customary and inflexible in character. Revenue from forest and pasture,on the other hand, was open to negotiation, often on an annual basis, soanxious was the community to have access to these resources. Furthermore, itwas access which was carefully policed and enforced by the lord’s officer. At atime when manorial lordship and seigniorial demesne exploitation were, in manyrespects, in decline, control of these assets was an important manifestation ofthe continuing power of lordship. That is why keepers, foresters, parkers, andassociated officials continue to figure prominently in late-medieval seigniorialaccounts 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 incharge of eleven forests and twenty-seven acres of reserved woodland.³² Verysimilar examples could doubtless be cited elsewhere, especially for upland Britain.Even in the market-oriented economy of lowland England, control of access toforest, waste, and water remained among the touchstones of lordly power andcommunity resentment into the late fourteenth century and beyond. We cansee as much in the demands that the rebels made during the Great Revoltof 1381.³³

Control of these assets was critical to seigniorial authority but it was also animportant source of aristocratic revenue. Sale of wood and charcoal could be verysignificant items of income. Elizabeth de Burgh exploited the timber resources ofher southern Welsh estates to maximum effect: they yielded almost 20 per centof the income of the lordship of Usk in 1329–30.³⁴ There was certainly bigmoney in timber for great lords: the Black Prince, ever short of cash and alwaysruthless in laying his hands on it, sold all the wood (except the great oaks) inPeckforton Park (Cheshire) in 1354 to a consortium for £533.³⁵ Ultimatelymore significant than once-off clearance sales such as this was the seigniorialcampaign to defend and extend rights over forest and pasture at every turn. Soit was, for example, that Earl Thomas of Lancaster (d. 1322) allegedly enclosed800 acres of wood in Kenilworth ‘par son seigneurie et son grant poiar’. So it waslikewise, on a much more modest scale, that the auditors of the earl of Salisburycalculated that if he let 366 acres of woodland at a minimum of two pence anacre (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 theDenbighshire 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.


than eightfold.³⁶ And increase forest and waste revenue often did, as seigniorialincome from arable and associated sources fell: the farm of the Great Forest ofBrecon, one of the largest tracts of upland in Wales, increased from £47 in 1340to £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, outstrippingthe revenue of earldoms such as Mar or Strathearn.³⁸ Individual examples donot necessarily form the sound basis for a general claim; but it is not difficult tosee why historians have concluded that control of multure, forest, and turbarywas an increasingly important aspect of lordship and one which may well havebeen underestimated.³⁹ It was particularly important for aristocratic lordship, forit was great lords who (alongside the king) controlled the large tracts of forestand pasture and had the jurisdictional rights and officialdom to exploit them tothe full.

Alongside forests, waste, and pasture we should certainly add other sources ofseigniorial revenue and control, notably mills and fisheries. Continental historianshave long since argued that some of the most momentous developments inthe entrenchment and elaboration of seigneurie from the eleventh centuryonwards took the form of the extension of the powers of the ban, as theyterm it—that is, the claims of lords to economic and associated monopoliesover the peasantry—such as the use of seigniorial mills, ovens, vine presses;the right to control brewing and baking, and the seigniorial tallage. Thesepowers of the ban do not figure so prominently in the English evidence or theEnglish historiography (partly because of the pre-eminence of royal power androyal documentation); on a broader British basis we may well underestimatetheir importance. Throughout Europe, the struggle over the control of millingrights—so crucial to a cereal-based economy—formed one of the most criticalchapters 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, thelocal communities found themselves the target of seigniorial ambition. The lordalone often had the capital to buy the equipment and hire the expertise to buildwatermills; to this he added the crucial claims that his tenants were required togrind their corn at his mills (either for a fixed fee or for a proportion of the cornground) and to repair the mill and transport the millstones. Manorial and otherrolls show that these obligations were often zealously exacted, even when otheraspects of the powers of lordship were in decline. Particularly, again, were theyimportant in upland communities, where rent rolls were often skeletal but wheremills stood as patent symbols of seigniorial authority and profiteering. Such, forexample, 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 ofDenbigh, 11–12.

³⁷ Davies, Lordship and Society, 122. ³⁸ Brown, Black Douglases, 166–7.³⁹ Duncan, Scotland, 351–60.


fisheries figure prominently in the revenue of the earls of Ulster, as do fisheriesin Moray.⁴⁰

If we are to understand the nature of medieval lordship, especially aristocraticlordship, 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 thana 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 thatland. The roll call of opportunities for the lord to exercise his power, and increasehis profits, in this respect were almost limitless, as close study of seigniorialcourt rolls quickly reveals. Land sales had to be registered in the lord’s court anddue 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 thewaste or forest had to be licensed; when there was a total failure of heirs the lordclaimed that the land reverted to him; and in upland districts, such as Wales, thelord’s title to ‘escheated land’ (that is, land to which he claimed that the title hadlapsed) was vigorously and profitably pursued and even as vigorously resisted bythe community. The story of this tightening seigniorial control of tenant landand the efforts that seigniorial officers, increasingly armed with written evidenceand title, made to promote it is one of the key chapters in the history of lordshipin the British Isles from the twelfth century onwards. It was still in full swing inthe fourteenth century, as other aspects of seigniorial exploitation were faltering.

It was clearly at its most aggressive and effective where the tenants were unfreesince there the scope for seigniorial control was proportionately the greater. Whathas struck historians time and time again was the remarkable tenacity, borderingon the vindictive, with which great lay and ecclesiastical lords defended andexploited their rights over serfs and their lands, even when the heart had goneout of demesne farming and an active manorial lordship, especially in the laterfourteenth century. The Mortimers, for example, were ruthless in this respect:their council decreed in 1391 that bond tenements were not to be transferred toa freeman ‘so long as a serf of blood can be found’ and no male or female bondperson was allowed to leave the manor of Odcombe (Somerset). It was a policywhich was followed by many other lords.⁴¹ But ultimately more important thanthe spectacular sums occasionally raised from fugitive serfs is the evidence of theway, year in year out, that lords exploited their power over land and those wholived on it to the end of our period; and none more effectively than some of thegreat lay lords.

The power of lordship over land, so we have argued, did not necessarily lie solelyor 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.


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 livesof its tenants. The instrument par excellence for this latter power was the lord’scourt. Lordship and the dispensing of justice went hand in hand in medievalsociety, in a fashion which it is difficult for the modern mind to appreciate. Inmodern society justice is the preserve of the state and of ‘public’ authority; it hasbecome detached from economic and social power. But in the medieval worldit was quite otherwise. Those who claimed lordship expected to exercise powersof justice over those whom they controlled, and over their lands. The paradigmof all lordship was, after all, the lordship of God: His was a judicial lordship asHe presided at the Last Judgment. Such was also the lordship of the king: he wasthe fountain, and lion, of justice; his crown existed, as the theorists put it, to dojudgment and justice and to give peace.

What was true of God and the king was true also of lords in general, great andsmall—from the one-manor lord to the greatest duke or earl. ‘By common law’, asa lawyer put it in the early fourteenth century, ‘every free man ought to have a courtfor his tenants.’⁴² The right to hold a court was a sine qua non of lordship: whenthe bishop of Moray gave the lordship of certain lands and of the men who livedon them to the earl of Fife, he also gave the earl and his heirs the right to hold a ‘fullcourt’ (plena curia).⁴³ This was the point that Gilbert Hay made as a generalizationand with admirable clarity: ‘A man is not a lord suppose he have never so muchof worldly goods, but he is a lord that has seignory and jurisdiction over othermen, 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 andhis 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 thecourt be characterized as the forum where the lord brought his power of lordshipto bear on his tenants and dependants and coerced them to accept and obey hisauthority across many aspects of their lives. The obligation to appear at the lord’scourt—suit of court—was a minimum obligation on all those who accepted thelord’s authority. It was particularly important in upland and western Britain whereother seigniorial powers—for example, over land—were relatively skeletal; buteven in lowland, manorialized England, where royal justice was pervasive and royalrecords have been allowed to dominate the historical argument, the seigniorialcourts 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.


There can be little doubt that the control exercised in and by seigniorial courtsgrew apace from the twelfth century, and is particularly evident when localcourt 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 seigniorializedjustice’ arrived in England and that manorial justice became ‘the very lifebloodof the agrarian and economic system’.⁴⁶ The articulation and exercise of thelord’s judicial power was a momentous chapter in the history of lordship. Muchof that power had to do not with law and justice narrowly conceived butwith disciplinary and coercive power over tenants and dependants—controllingtheir land transactions and titles, supervising and enforcing their tenurial andassociated obligations, issuing ordinances and statutes, and so forth. It may wellbe that historians, especially historians of medieval England, have underestimatedthe pervasiveness and effectiveness of seigniorial justice in this respect. It is partlythat in much of England the powers of ‘high’ criminal and even civil justicewere reserved for the king and his courts; it is also undoubtedly the case that therichness of royal and associated court records has served to focus attention onthe activities of the king and his officers and away from lords and their officialsand 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 justiceof lords to bear on the lives of their tenants and dependants in much of theBritish Isles. Some of them had no more than a modest manorial jurisdiction;but elsewhere, especially on the estates of the great magnates, extensive powershad been appropriated by, or confirmed to, local lords. These courts met on aregular, often three-weekly, basis, though some of the major investigative courts(such as the tourn) would only assemble twice yearly. In many respects they werethe 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 heldin 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 whatcannot be doubted is the way that lordship, through its courts, shaped the livesof those who lived under its authority.

Lordship and justice went hand in hand at all levels of society; but whatis of particular interest to us is the effectiveness and range of lordly justiceat the levels of the higher aristocracy. Here again the perspective gained bybringing the whole of the British Isles within the purview of our analysis helpsto redress the imbalance induced by concentrating on the southern and midlandEnglish evidence. It is true, of course, that the lords of the great palatinatesof England (such as Chester and Lancaster) and of its extensive ecclesiasticalliberties (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.


of jurisdictional powers which were a very far cry from the modest powers ofmanorial lords. But it is when we leave the much-governed and royally dominatedworld of England that we catch a glimpse of the full possibilities of the rangeof seigniorial jurisdiction. It is a world of power structures very different fromthe neatly reticulated and hierarchical pattern of royal and communal justice socharacteristic of royal England.

Such is the world that we come across in the March of Wales, where eachlordship was truly a sovereign jurisdictional unit, where the king’s writ was notserved by his officers, and where (in a near contemporary phrase) the lords were‘the soveraigne governors of their subjects’. English Ireland was in some respectsdifferent—not least because the constitutions of English law and administrationhad been consciously imported into the country and because the king of Englandhad reserved to himself the four major pleas of the crown and jurisdiction inerror. But in truth—whatever the veneer of institutional forms—much of thereality of governance and justice in English Ireland lay in the hands of localmagnates, their followers, and officers. It could hardly be otherwise, particularlyin the major liberties—Ulster, Trim, Kildare, Kilkenny, Wexford, Tipperary,and Thomond—which lay outside the area of shire ground and accounted forover half of the territorial extent of English Ireland.⁴⁸

Turning to Scotland, it is the hybrid character of its power structures which hasincreasingly struck historians. English-type institutions—notably the shire, thejusticiarship, and the formulae of English writs—took deep root in the country,especially in the south and the east. They have been understandably privileged byhistorians, partly because the future belonged to them and partly because royaldocumentation provided one of the few points of entry into the world of medievalScottish justice. But in any overview of Scotland as a whole it is what have beencalled ‘regionalized power structures’ and the role of the aristocracy—and,crucially, the local community in its various forms—which have attractedattention. Indeed in some respects, with the definition of what were the rights offree baronies and the wide powers conferred in ‘regalities’, the aristocratic flavourof governance and justice in later medieval Scotland was further confirmed.⁴⁹ Itis little wonder that a recent historian of Scotland has concluded that ‘in localitiesunder the rule of a great magnate’—and such localities were extensive in muchof Wales, Ireland, and Scotland—‘aristocratic justice was the norm.’⁵⁰ Thesignificance of this claim stands even if we concede—as we surely must—thatmuch, probably most, justice was dispensed in medieval society in and by thecommunity 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.), Atlasof Scottish History, 201–7.

⁵⁰ M. Brown, The Wars of Scotland, 1214–1371 (Edinburgh, 2004), 106; MacQueen, CommonLaw and Feudal Society, 50–54.


But what is perhaps of most interest for the present analysis is that the non-English evidence allows us to glimpse a world in which great lords dominatedthe jurisdictional horizon. It was a world which had been overlaid in England bythe institutions and mechanisms of royal government and by the common washof a common law, common legal practices, and an increasingly professional legalcadre. Elsewhere in the British Isles we come across a seigniorial world muchmore redolent of the practices of the eleventh and twelfth centuries. The centralor honour courts of the great Welsh Marcher lordships—such as Glamorgan,Pembroke, Brecon, Gower—continued to meet as ‘feudal’ assemblies, presidedover by the lord’s steward and attended by his vassals (fideles). Within theselordships their jurisdiction was complete and unchallenged in matters civil,territorial, and criminal.⁵¹ It is a world which is replicated in the honorialcourts of the great Irish liberties such as Trim, Meath, Kildare, and Carlow.⁵²The situation was probably similar in much of aristocratic Scotland—as in hishonorial courts which Earl David of Huntingdon (d. 1219) held in his lordshipof 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 areminder to us that, however much the forms and practices of aristocratic justiceshad been formalized and institutionalized, the lord’s personality and power layat its origin. The court after all was not only a judicial assembly; it was a forumin which the lord displayed his authority and through which he exercised hispower. That is why it was often held in the most majestic and authoritativeof venues. The court of the great Warenne/Fitzalan lordship of Bromfield andYale in north-east Wales was held in the bailey of the castle of Holt. It was theleast convenient venue in the lordship but the sheer scale of the castle whichtowered over it was a reminder of the power of lordship.⁵⁴ These occasions wereall the more impressive when the lord attended in person, either in his own rightor as the representative of the keep. We hear graphically of Alexander Stewart(d. 1405), the Wolf of Badenoch as he was unflatteringly called, holding hiscourt ‘at the standing stone of ‘‘Ester Kyngncy’’ in Badenoch’ and ‘sitting thereas 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 theouter 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 earldomof Strathearn see the various studies by Cynthia Neville, including ‘A Celtic Enclave in NormanScotland: Earl Gilbert of Strathearn, 1171–1223’, in Freedom and Authority: Historical andHistoriographical Essays Presented to Grant G. Simpson, ed. T. Brotherstone and D. Ditchburn (EastLinton, 2000), 75–92.

⁵⁴ Davies, Lordship and Society, 75, n. 33.⁵⁵ Moray Reg., no. 159 (1380); Mort. Reg., II, no. 229 (1476).


Nor are these examples simply Scottish exceptions. Few lords could resist thetemptation to preside at their courts when they visited their lordships on tour.Henry Bolingbroke, recently promoted to be duke of Hereford, did so at Breconon 6 November 1397; Reginald Grey did so on his frequent visits to Ruthin innorth Wales. Even when he was not personally present, the lord’s wishes were asource of final, and often first, resort in quite minor judicial and quasi-judicialmatters—issuing pardons, cancelling penalties, laying down procedures, andvehemently defending the honour of the court and its authority.⁵⁶ And if thelord did not appear to sit at his court, he could reinforce the authority of hislocal judicial officials by sending members of his council on quasi-judicial visitsto the localities and, in Wales and Cheshire, by holding sessions in eyre whenlocal courts were suspended and the lord’s justices—much like the royal justicesin eyre in England in the thirteenth century—exercised the most ample judicialpowers in his name.⁵⁷

The wider we cast our historical nets in the British Isles, the more impressiveand multifaceted does the range of aristocratic jurisdictional power strike us. Itwas more far-reaching than the evidence for much of lowland England—whereso many of the powers and profits of high justice had been reserved for theking—would suggest. This is reflected in the profits that aristocratic lordsderived from judicial revenue. In much of lowland England it was rarely morethan 10 per cent of seigniorial revenue: the court yields of Elizabeth de Burghfor her Dorset and East Anglian manors were, for example, paltry. But once wemove outside this area the figures can be truly impressive. The Black Prince madehuge judicial profits from his judicial powers in the palatinate of Chester; so didthe dukes of Lancaster from the county of Lancaster, especially after they weregranted palatinate powers there in 1351 (limited only by the royal prerogativeof pardon and the crown’s right to correct errors of justice).⁵⁸ In 1395–6, forexample, the county courts, tourns, wapentakes, and various other officers ofthe county of Lancaster yielded £514—a very handsome annual income for abaron.⁵⁹ But it is when we move into the March of Wales—we do not seem tohave comparable figures for Scotland and Ireland⁶⁰—that court yields becomea truly impressive source of seigniorial revenue. There were, of course, localvariations and in particular between the Welsh upland districts and the lowlandmanorialized regions, but in general terms court issues brought in between 25and 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 paralleledfrom 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, Lordshipand 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.


(that is, buying off ) the visit of justices in eyre, the figure stood as high as 50per cent or more.⁶¹ It made good the modest income from land and rents; itis also a reminder of the amplitude and significance of judicial lordship in theworld 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 medi-eval parlance and practice that it is in modern terminology. The distinctionsbetween law, arbitration, administration, grace, and favour were blurred in afashion which modern categories find puzzling. The open-ended character ofroyal justice—dispensing equity, grace, and mercy as well as operating alonginstitutionalized curial lines—was replicated in aristocratic justice. Much ofit—as has of late been fully appreciated by historians⁶²—operated througharbitration, both between the magnate’s own retainers and in private cases. Sucharbitration was an acknowledgement that it was the duty of great lords, such asJohn of Gaunt,⁶³ as much as of the king to defuse social tensions and to do soextra-curially as well as in pursuit of their judicial power.

Indeed the world of aristocratic lordship—like that of royal lordship—oper-ated 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 relationshipsand eased tensions. The lord himself, his major officials, and his council werein receipt of an endless flow of petitions and requests, oral and written.⁶⁴Sifting 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 engineof oppression and not to cross the line into the extortionate, it was vital thatthis channel of dialogue be kept open and regularly used. No doubt lords actedarbitrarily and high-handedly from time to time; but when we have a substantialbody of evidence of the petitionary process at work—as we have amply in thecorrespondence of John of Gaunt—what is generally impressive is the way thatthe duke of Lancaster insists on due process of investigation, proper inquiry, andrespect for established custom. To take one case, when John Batter sent a bill ofcomplaint to the duke, the duke’s steward was ordered to scrutinize the bill andthe record and process to which it referred, to correct any errors if there shouldbe such, and ‘do right as well for our profit and of the parts, according to thelaws 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: Lawand Human Relations in the West, ed. J. Bossy (Cambridge, 1983), 47–67; L. B. Smith, ‘Disputesand 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.


What we have tried to capture in this chapter is some of the ways in whicharistocratic lordship exercised its power over medieval society in the British Isles.There was, of course, no single such agenda: the character of lordship variedfrom region to region and period to period; its powers and effectiveness had toadjust to the social and economic contours of its various worlds. Lordship wasfounded on custom; it took the world as it found it—though this did not meanthat 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 wasabout the exercise of lordship (and particularly the novelty of its claims), notabout lordship itself. Beyond the abstractions of the schoolmen about dominium,there is no evidence that a defence or analysis of lordship was called for. Auditorscould certainly submit insightful reports on the state of the lord’s finances andfascinating memoranda could be submitted to the lord’s council on improvingthe conduct of estate management;⁶⁶ but it required the cataclysm of a socialrevolt, the Peasants’ Rising of 1381, to raise the fundamental questions aboutthe justification and propriety of lordship and even to insist that there was nolordship other than that of the king.

The lordship which we have tried to bring into view in this broad-brushsketch 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. Butroyal lordship, especially in England and to a rather lesser extent in Scotland,had become increasingly distinctive in the public character of its claims andjustification, in the way its authority penetrated into the interstices of local lifeand 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 wetake the British Isles as a whole as our historical agenda, the distinction betweenroyal and aristocratic lordship has arguably been exaggerated, especially from anEnglish perspective; but this is in no way to deny that a chasm now existed andthat it was becoming more pronounced. At the other end of the spectrum ofpower, many of the features described above—tributes, rents, control of landand tenants, jurisdiction among them—would figure among the rights exercisedby 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 thebreadth 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 toacknowledge. The lords of the Welsh March raised their own armies, launchedtheir own ‘wars’, flaunted their own ‘law of the March’, and were exempt fromthe 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 fascinatingmemorandum submitted to the Mortimer council in BL Egerton Roll 8718 (1395–7).


the great liberties of English Ireland, and the regalities of fifteenth-centuryScotland—aristocratic lordship fell well short of such ambitions. Yet aristocraticlordship was more than the sum of the individual components of its parts. Eventhe sum was important: the sheer size of aristocratic inheritances, extended overseveral shires and even countries, set them apart, and so did the status of theirlords. So did the stages—national and even international as well as local andregional—on which these lords moved. So did the scale of their income, theinfluence 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 hispatrimony that one could assess a great magnate’s power.⁶⁷ It is the roots of thatpower that we have reviewed above; but lordship was manifested in the way itwas exercised. That is the theme of the following chapters.


For tributary lordship in Ireland, K. Simms, ‘Guesting and Feasting in GaelicIreland’, Journal of the Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland, 100 (1978–9). Forthe balance between tributary and land-lordship in the south-west of the country,A. McCormack, The Earldom of Desmond, 1463–1583: The Decline and Crisisof 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 theLand 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 andpastoral farming, and the significance of demesne farming in early fourteenth-century England, B. M. S. Campbell and K. Bartley, England on the Eve of theBlack Death: An Atlas of Lay Lordship, Land and Wealth, 1300–49 (Manchester,2006), and B. M. S. Campbell, ‘The Agrarian Problem in the Early FourteenthCentury’, 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 CentralNottinghamshire, 1163–1363’, in English Government in the Thirteenth Century,ed. A. Jobson (Woodbridge, 2004). For the decline of demesne farming, a casestudy from East Anglia is presented in D. Stone, Decision-Making in MedievalAgriculture (Oxford, 2005). The same area in a slightly later period is studied in

⁶⁷ Quoted above, p. 162.


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 RockinghamForest, Northamptonshire’, Medieval Archaeology, 45 (2001). Records relatingto 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 Manorc.1200-c.1500 (Manchester, 2002); Medieval Society and the Manor Court, ed.Z. Razi and R. Smith (Oxford, 1996); R. Evans, ‘Whose was the ManorialCourt?’ 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 MedievalEngland’, Historical Research, 81 (2008), 399–422; P. Schofield, ‘Manorial CourtRolls and the Peasant Land Market in Eastern England, c.1250 − c.1350’ andM. Müller, ‘Seigniorial Control and the Peasant Land Market in the FourteenthCentury: A Comparative Approach’, both in Feller and Wickham (eds.), LeMarché de la Terre au Moyen Âge. Recent publications of court rolls are The CourtRolls of Walsham le Willows, 1305–50 and 1351–99, ed. R. Lock. 2 vols. SuffolkRecord Society, vols. 41 and 45 (Woodbridge, 1998, 2002) and The Court Rollsof Elmley Castle, Worcestershire, 1347–1564, ed. R. K. Field, WorcestershireHistorical Society, vol. 20 (Worcester, 2004). For court rolls from fifteenth-century Ireland see Handbook and Select Calendar of Sources for Medieval Irelandin the National Archives of the United Kingdom, ed. P. Dryburgh and B. Smith(Dublin, 2005), section 3.

7The Agencies and Agents of Lordship

‘There is a fine and great lordship there, which if it were well managed would beworth not less than two thousand marks a year.’ Such was the excited report that aroyal commissioner submitted to Edward I in 1302, commenting on the potentialof the Bohun lordship of Brecon in the March of Wales. It was a report to makethe mouth of the cash-strapped king water, particularly as he had Humphrey deBohun, earl of Hereford and lord of Brecon, in a tight corner at the time.¹ But itwas a report with a sting in its tail: the potential of the lordship was dependent onsound management. This was, of course, a basic truism for all lordship, from thelevel of the household and the manor upwards. But it had a particular relevanceto 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 soafter, the Norman Conquest was the way it was widely fragmented geographically.Such fragmentation was frequently compounded in each generation as estateswere divided, temporarily or permanently, in family settlements or as the windfallsof marriage and inheritance added new estates which needed to be absorbed intothe family’s power orbit. Similar fragmentation was certainly not unknown inother parts of the British Isles, not least because the norms of English commonlaw and inheritance practices had come to dominate the aristocratic world inmuch of lowland Scotland, Marcher Wales, and English Ireland. Nevertheless inbroad terms it may be suggested that in these areas aristocratic power was moreconsolidated in territorial blocs—be it in the provincial earldoms and regionallordships (as they have been termed) of Scotland, the great Marcher lordship ofWales (several of which such as Glamorgan or Brecon were close to the size of asmall English county), or the extensive liberties of English Ireland.²

It was otherwise in England, as extensive aristocratic estates sprawled overvast swathes of the country. A couple of examples may serve to make the pointbriefly. By far the largest aristocratic lordship in the mid and late fourteenthcentury was the duchy of Lancaster.³ It had been assembled largely by royalmunificence 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.


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 allthe counties of England and into south Wales. Not all these estates were, ofcourse, equal in value and importance. Rather were they composed of groupsof 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 heexpected his authority—alongside that of the king—to be openly acknowledgedand taken for granted. John of Gaunt had several such ‘countries’: in Lancashire(centred on Lancaster, where palatinate rights had further reinforced the duke’sstanding from 1351 and again from 1377), Yorkshire (centred on the honour ofPontefract), in a batch of major honors—including Bolingbroke, Tutbury, andLeicester—across the north Midlands, and to a rather lesser degree in Norfolk,Suffolk, and south Wales. Over and above these major concentrations, therewas a substantial scattering of castles, lordships, and manors across the face ofEngland from Dunstanburgh in Northumberland to Aldbourne in Wiltshire andPevensey in Sussex.⁴ Individually these outliers were not in the front rank ofLancaster property; but in their localities they were nodal points of the duke’sauthority and influence. The Lancastrian inheritance as a whole gave Gaunt animmense income and was clearly one of the foundations—though not necessarilythe most important one—of his power as a national and indeed internationalfigure. It also posed hugely challenging problems for him.

So likewise did the complex of lands which Gaunt’s much younger contem-porary, Roger Mortimer, earl of March (d. 1398), had come to control. Theyield of his estates in the year he died was probably around £4,000, that is, abouta third of that of John of Gaunt’s vast inheritance. Even so, such an incomecertainly 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 Mortimerlands were not, within England, by any means so geographically widespread asthe duchy of Lancaster, they were still geographically extensive and, thereby,managerially daunting.⁵ Initially they had been concentrated not far from theMortimer caput at Wigmore and, later, Ludlow—in the western counties ofEngland 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 greatMarcher lordships (worth close on £1,000 each in annual income) of Denbighand Usk/Caerleon in 1354 and 1368 respectively. But the Mortimers also hadvaluable individual manors and boroughs (such as Bridgewater and Cranbournein 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 ofConquest, 396, 406–7; and for the manors of the bailiwick of Clare, Holmes, Estates, 87. Details onthe valuation of the Mortimer estates in Davies, Lordship and Society, 188–9.

The Agencies and Agents of Lordship 181

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 alsosecured the title to major lordships in Ireland (Trim, Meath, Connacht, and theearldom of Ulster) and were to spend much of their time and energy in the reignsof Edward II and Richard II discharging their responsibilities and enforcing theirlordship there.

The fragmented and geographically dispersed nature of great aristocraticinheritances, such as those of Lancaster and Mortimer, posed daunting managerialproblems for their lords. ‘Management’ is not a word which we readily associatewith great aristocratic lords. Terms such as honour, largesse, prowess, display, andmagnificence seem more appropriate. Yet these qualities were hardly unmatchedby a shrewd and often ruthless business sense. It is written large in the valuations onthe folios of Domesday Book or in the famous entry in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicleon William I’s auction of assets to the highest bidder. Where kings led, the greatmagnates would assuredly follow. Their lordship, especially in the thirteenth andfourteenth centuries, became a ruthlessly exploitative lordship—ad maximumdetrimentum possidentium (to the maximum disadvantage of tenants), as the earlof Gloucester put it in a devastating aside.⁶ In the process they put in placethe mechanisms for transforming lordship into a routinized, micro-managingmechanism and recruited the personnel to staff it. It is an achievement which hasbeen consistently underrated; it is ultimately an important chapter in the historyof lordship and governance in medieval England. It is well worth asking brieflywhy it has not warranted more attention.

The governance of medieval England—and to a lesser but still considerableextent of Scotland and English Ireland—has been constructed and described inprimarily royalist, king-centred, terms. This is inevitable given the ubiquitousnessof royal power, law, and jurisdiction; a fairly uniform and streamlined patternof offices and officers, appointable by and answerable to a central authority; andthe institutions of common taxation, coinage, and assembly. None of that is, ofcourse, to be gainsaid especially in England, even if we need to add that mostof the work of royal and communal government in the localities was dischargedby magnates and county gentry and that much of the hundredal organization,though formally in ‘public’ control, was in ‘private’ hands. But what qualifiesthe picture particularly for us is that alongside this complex framework of royal-communal governance was, often, a puzzlingly complex network of non-royalgovernance. The sheriff of Yorkshire operated cheek by jowl with the stewardof Pontefract, the receiver of the manor of Leicester with the escheator of thecounty. Such non-royal governance ranged from the modest powers of the localmanorial lord (sometimes fortified by specific franchises such as the assize of ale)to the extensive powers of great ecclesiastical corporations and monasteries. Thepower network operated and controlled by the great lay lords of the British Isles

⁶ Hilton, Medieval Society, 132.


was an essential part of the portfolio of governance and lordship in medievalsociety. It alone eventually enabled the duke of Lancaster and the earl of Marchto ‘manage’ their widely scattered inheritances efficiently and to exercise theirlordship to best effect.

It is not difficult to explain why the importance and achievement of thispattern of seigniorial governance has been frequently overlooked, or at leastunderestimated, by historians. It is, as usual, partly a matter of documentation.Royal financial records survive regularly from the 1150s; royal secretarial recordsfrom c.1200. It is not until c.1250—though earlier on ecclesiastical estates—thatthe financial and court records of the lay nobility begin to survive and even thenvery patchily, and hardly at all in an unbroken series. Then again such recordsas 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 formthe basis of easy generalizations about the nature of seigniorial governance.Furthermore, the very widespread nature of so many large aristocratic estatesmeant that the administrative arrangements which were put in place to governand exploit them partook of the nature of a spider’s web rather than the solidblocs of governance familiar in Scotland, Wales, and Ireland—or for that mattermuch of France. Seigniorial stewards and receivers often held authority overwidely dispersed manors and lordships, their sphere of activity criss-crossingin a confusing plethora of patterns with those of other lords’ offices (lay andecclesiastical) and those of the king. That is why it has proved impossible torepresent such patterns cartographically.⁷

But this should not be allowed to conceal the fact that in the thirteenth andfourteenth centuries in particular the pattern of seigniorial governance changedso profoundly that it affected the nature of lordship itself and brought the powerof such lordship to bear more intensively and regularly on those who lived underits authority. This change needs to be placed in the context of a broad culturaltransformation. Lordship continued to base its authority on custom and was notafraid of wielding its coercive power; but economic exploitation, profitability,and the opportunities of the market now became some of the watchwordsof seigniorial policy. They were inculcated in treatises on estate management.They were accompanied by, and expressed in, a growing emphasis on regularrecord-keeping and accountability. This was part of the triumph of what hasbeen called ‘pragmatic literacy’. On seigniorial estates in England—and soon byimitation in English-controlled or -influenced parts of the British Isles—the key‘take-off period’ seems to be the late thirteenth century. Manorial and householdaccounts, court rolls, and enrolled series of ministers’ accounts begin to surviveand by the mid fourteenth century had acquired a largely standardized formwhich 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.


effectively serviced by the training and recruitment of a cadre of officials whocould employ their skills in the world of the triumph of the written word andthe audited account. The impact on the effectiveness and reach of lordship wasenormous: central control, close local supervision, regular reporting and auditing,and a nexus of close relationships between the scattered parts of a large seigniorialinheritance were now possible, indeed normal. It was these long-term culturalchanges which made late medieval lordship truly ‘manageable’ and it is to thenature of that ‘management’ that we now turn.

There is no single formula which will describe adequately the mechanisms andarrangements which came to constitute the pattern of seigniorial governance inmedieval Britain. Variety was the keynote, as was to be expected in a worldof plurality of lordships and challenges. In the late thirteenth–early fourteenthcenturies in particular, there is as yet little indication of the establishment ofa unified, streamlined administrative framework which would weld the lord’sinheritance into an effective unit. The inheritance appears to be, administratively,little more than the sum of its component estates.⁸ The extensive lands ofEdmund, earl of Cornwall (d. 1300), were simply composed of nine local receiptseach under its local steward; likewise, there were three–four receiverships, ratherthan 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 annualaccounts as survive—such as the rich Bigod local accounts for the late thirteenthcentury or the large composite counter-rolls for the Lacy and Lancaster estates1295–6, 1304–5, and 1313–14—still reveal officials and scribes fumblingrather 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 ofgood practice, especially in the ranks of the professional managerial class) a broadpattern of the character and operational practices of seigniorial governance hadclearly emerged. It is that broad pattern—not its particularities or individualspecificities—which we will now try to capture as part of our understanding ofthe nature of lordship. Evidence will be drawn from a variety of sources, buttwo in particular have been privileged—the archives of the duchy of Lancasterin the later years of John of Gaunt because they are, far and away, the richestand most integrated set of seigniorial records; and, secondly, the munimentsof the Mortimer family, earls of March, the distinction of which lies not intheir quality and quantity but in the fact that they include a good deal of draftmemoranda and expense accounts which take us behind the bland formulae ofthe final accounts.

⁸ I readily acknowledge my debt on this topic to K. B. McFarlane’s unpublished 1954 courseof lectures, English Seigniorial Administration and its Records 1290–1536 (Magdalen College,Oxford, GPD/26/II/36).


Ultimately the character of seigniorial governance depended on the person ofthe lord; so it was with lordship as it was with kingship. It was he who set thetone. When a report sought to explain the discrepancy between the potentialof 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 quotedabove¹⁰—of the close attention that great aristocrats could pay to the minutiaeof estate affairs and of the way that petitions and requests were regularly deferredfor their personal attention. One has only to turn the pages of the Register ofEdward the Black Prince to hear the strident tones of his officials and tenants: thatwas ‘hands-on’, hard-nosed lordship. And it worked at a distance: a steady flowof messengers and letters (such as those between Richard Beauchamp, earl ofWarwick (d. 1439), from France and his council in England) kept lords regularlybriefed on their officers. Even when the bureaucratic and administrative machineof a great inheritance had become complex and routinized, the lord’s personalwishes were often still the final word. So it is, to take a late example, that we catcha 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 shouldform 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 outof the personal, household offices of the king, the curia regis, until it reachedthe point of sophistication and complexity when the officers and the officesbegan (in the phrase of historians) ‘to go out of court’. So it was with seigniorialadministration. After all, the prime purpose of the lord’s estates was to providethe financial wherewithal to meet the needs of his household. So it was that inearly 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 thewardrober—that estate revenues were transferred. This remained the practice onthe estates of Elizabeth de Burgh (d. 1360), lady of Clare, which have a strongcase to be regarded as the most professionally run (and well-documented) nobleinheritance of the mid fourteenth century, or of the Bohun estates of the earlsof Hereford. In neither was there as yet a separate financial office or officer;moneys were paid directly by local accountants into the household coffers ofthe lord.

But it was inevitable that such a skeletal, informal household framework shouldgradually be supplemented by a dedicated set of central estate offices, institutionsand officers. To that degree household and estate administration—though,of course, still interdependent in many respects—became separate. It was aninevitable development on all major aristocratic estates. The need for continuityand 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.


others were the growing professionalization of the lord’s administrative cadre,the regular production of sets of annual, interrelated accounts, and the need tocoordinate policies and decisions.

The head of the lord’s central staff was often known as the chief stewardor occasionally as the surveyor of the lord’s lands. These descriptions indicatedthat he had a supervisory authority over subsidiary local stewards and was inoverall charge of policy decisions on the lord’s estates. He no doubt presidedover the lord’s council in his absence; dealt with many of the petitions that wereforwarded to him by the lord; went on inspection tours of the lord’s estates eitherunder his own authority (as on the tour of the Stafford estates in 1386) or ashead of a conciliar delegation. So vast was the range of lands under the rule ofthe Lancaster duchy that the responsibilities of the chief steward were dividedinto two and occasionally three areas of jurisdiction—north and south of theTrent 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 tourthrough Nottingham, Leicester, and Pontefract in February–March 1397, spentnineteen days supervising the lord’s household at Hereford, followed by a furtherthirty-two days in London with other members of the duke’s council. It was bysuch dedication and itineration that the lordship of the duke of Lancaster waskept in good heart.¹²

The men who held such a responsible position were almost invariably personsof 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 theHouse of Commons (1376), M.P. for Herefordshire and steward of EdmundMortimer earl of March; or Sir Thomas Mortimer, a junior member of theMortimer dynasty who in effect headed the council which ran the Mortimerestates 1381–93; or Sir Thomas Hungerford, Gaunt’s chief steward in the southparts of the duchy of Lancaster (1375–93), MP and Speaker (1377) and a manso 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 councilof Richard Beauchamp, earl of Warwick, and his trusted confidant.¹³ Thesemen could not be expected to give full-time service to their lords or to eat athis table day-in, day-out. They had their own estates and careers to attend toand 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 agood smattering of legal knowledge and were conversant with the problems andchallenges which all landowners faced. They were precisely the sort of men whocould bring the lord’s authority to bear on local society but who could also berelied upon to address the broad issues involved in governing a large aristocraticinheritance.

¹² TNA DL 28/3/5 f.8.¹³ For their biographies see Roskell et al. (eds.), House of Commons 1386–1421.


The steward or chief steward provided authority and policy direction, especiallywhen the lord was a minor, on campaign, or otherwise preoccupied. But in termsof the routine supervision and integration of the administration it might wellbe that two other sets of officials were more central—the chief financial officerand the auditor. We cannot expect consistency and uniformity here any morethan in any other sphere of seigniorial administration; but on an increasingnumber of estates a single financial official—often bearing the title receiver-general—becomes the chief accounting and supervising officer for the estaterevenue (but often not for other sources of income) of the lord, therebyseparating clearly household and estate responsibilities. It would appear that itwas 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 theking’s son should follow the practice and terminology of the seigniorial worldrather than that of the royal exchequer); the dukes of Lancaster certainly hadsuch 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 ofBeauchamp 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 clericsand would expect their reward in a benefice or even a canonry. The demandson their services were much more full-time than those of the steward. Whenthey were not in attendance at the lord’s court and council, they were regularlyon tour inspecting the finances and affairs of the lord’s local estates. WalterBrugge, the receiver-general of the Mortimer estates in the 1380s and 1390s,travelled ceaselessly (as we know from his crabbed expenses accounts) from oneend of England to the other, throughout Wales, and regularly to Ireland.¹⁴ Heearned his rewards—including the archdeaconry of Meath and a canonry ofYork—but he had little time to enjoy them or to discharge the duties attachedto them. What is not in doubt is that his hard work was critical to ensuringthe profitability and good running of the Mortimer inheritance during a longand difficult minority. Walter’s career could be paralleled by that of many of hisfellow senior seigniorial accountants—such as John Leventhorp, the financialconfidant of Henry Bolingbroke, who was promoted to be receiver-general ofthe 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 withastonishing thoroughness. Local officials were ruthlessly cross-examined; theirindentures and tallies were rigorously scrutinized; pleas for allowances weremonitored and often reduced or disallowed; arrears were listed and instalment

¹⁴ Davies, Owain Glyn Dwr, 42–3.¹⁵ For Leventhorp (and his journeys), Somerville, Duchy of Lancaster, I, 132, 156–8.


arrangements for their payment put in place; rentals were reviewed and composed;and major decisions on local policy—for example, on repairing mills or con-tinuing demesne farming—were taken. Written and no doubt oral reports werecompiled and submitted to the lord’s senior officers and council, with requestsfor a final decision.¹⁶ We can guess the rigour of the exercise if we recall thatthe half-yearly audit (visus compote) of three Mortimer estates (Clare, Bardfield,and Sudbury) lasted for eighteen days in 1389.¹⁷ The men who undertook suchexercises were professionals to their fingertips. The auditor in 1389 was ThomasHildeburgh: he had moved up from local service (he was clerk of accounts forthe bailiwick of Clare in 1366–7) into central duties and from the service ofLionel, duke of Clarence (d. 1368), to that of Clarence’s son-in-law, EdmundMortimer, earl of March (d. 1381). There were many like him: Philip Melrethwas receiver-general of Humphrey Bohun, earl of Hereford (d. 1373), but withthe death of his master without male heirs of his body he looked for new openingsand became one of John of Gaunt’s auditors.¹⁸

It was this handful of top officials—often supplemented by others, such asthe chancellor who headed the secretariat of John of Gaunt or the secretariatwho looked after the officers of Thomas of Woodstock, duke of Gloucester(d. 1397)—who formed the kernel of the lord’s professional advisers (much asthe chancellor, treasurer and keeper of the privy seal performed a like function forthe king). They would no doubt keep in close touch with the lord’s householdofficers—including the chamberlain, keeper of the great wardrobe, treasurer ofwar—and would draw on the service of a body of clerks. It was this group whichgave coherence and direction to the policies which integrated the inheritance ofthe lord into an effective administrative unit. They would be members of hiscouncil.¹⁹

In all that we know about aristocratic—as indeed of royal—councils, wewould 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 adhoc basis; so were many of his momentous decisions shaped. Yet it was inevitablethat as central aristocratic governance habits became more sophisticated andregular, the role and power of the lord’s habitual advisers—whether formallycalled a council or not—should come into sharper focus (especially in thearchives 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 ofthe southern estates in 1388. Equally revealing, with marginal notes, are the memoranda submittedto 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.


and the Mowbrays). As with the king’s privy council, so it was with thearistocracy: a small group of his professional servants (whose duties we haveoutlined above) would meet on a regular basis to deal with the plethora ofadministrative and financial problems and petitions which had to be attendedto on a weekly basis. We catch a glimpse, for example, of three men—SirGeorge Felbrigg (a Mortimer retainer and county knight), William Forde (atrusted clerk), and Walter Brugge (the receiver-general)—at the earl of March’scouncil in 1393.²⁰ Such a small, workaday council would be reinforced for thediscussion of more weighty and legal matters by a group of local retainers andgentlemen and by hired legal advisers. Such meetings might be held over anumber of days, as happened during the long-drawn-out and bitter negotiationsin the 1390s between the duke of Gloucester and the earl of Hereford overthe partition of the Bohun inheritance.²¹ These reinforced meetings were oftenreferred to—certainly in the documents of the Black Prince, John of Gaunt,Roger Mortimer, the Beauchamps, and the Mowbrays—as ‘the great council ofthe lord’ or ‘the entire and continuous council’.²² The business which the councilcould and did attend to was almost limitless: it regularly received petitions andacted as an appellate body: tricky local issues and policy decisions were referredto it; local officers and tenants were summoned to testify before it. It often metat the lord’s headquarters (frequently his London residence); but equally it couldtravel around his estates, dealing with issues locally.

What we have found in this outline description of the central agencies ofaristocratic lordship is that in general terms the agents and agencies whichcoordinated the activities of aristocratic governance corresponded, on a smallerscale, to those we find in the king’s administration of his realm. So did theprocedures that were followed, the regular and integrated sets of household,central, and local documents that were produced, the reliance on writtencommands, vouchers, and evidence, the processes of audit and the personnel(increasingly professionally trained clerical bureaucrats complemented by literateand capable retainers and laymen of standing). To that extent there was acontinuum of experience and habits across the field of governance, royal,aristocratic, and ecclesiastic. Given that this was so, there could be a transfer ofpersonnel, and a sharing of responsibilities, between one sphere and another.William de Manton served as wardrober and later clerk of the chamber for thatoutstanding 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 inLondon 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 MedievalAdministrative History, 6 vols. (Manchester, 1920–33), V, 382.


death to the service of the king’s son, Lionel of Clarence, and then rose to beEdward III’s keeper of the wardrobe 1361–6. There were, one suspects, very fewtricks 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 beenmany like him, especially as aristocratic estates—and thereby the personnel oftheir administration—passed, temporarily or otherwise, under royal control.And inevitably in a small and intimate world posts were shared: the descriptionof Roger Cheney as ‘steward of the earl of Arundel and at that time (1316) sheriffof 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 regularlyunderestimated in historical writing—partly because of the plurality of lords (asopposed to the singularity of royal administration) and the quality of the survivingevidence, partly because of an unfounded assumption that seigniorial governancewas necessarily inferior or derivative. Second in a balanced and rounded view ofthe governance of medieval society, the agencies and agents of aristocratic lordshipshould figure alongside those of kings, bishops, ecclesiastical corporations, andothers. These were the men who governed—and never doubted their right togovern—society; the distinction in status and in the niceties of their relationshipswas less important than the common factor that they exercised lordship.

It was at the central level that seigniorial governance was probably most innovativeand challenging in its practices. But the lord’s inheritance was composed of scoresand indeed often hundreds of lordships and manors often scattered across largeswathes of Britain. Here the lord’s authority was enmeshed in local traditionsand power structures and relied overwhelmingly on the services of local men. Itcomes as no surprise, therefore, that there is little that is uniform and streamlinedabout seigniorial governance in the localities. If we are to witness the scale andambitiousness 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, theMarcher lordships of Wales, and the provincial earldoms of Scotland. Whatwe see here—especially in the first two, for the evidence for Scotland appearsscanty—is how lords could in effect produce little kingdoms in miniature ontheir estates. The great advantage of the Irish liberties and Welsh lordships wasthat they were large, consolidated estates where the lord’s power—financially,jurisdictionally, and otherwise—was close to exclusive. A range of offices andofficers were put in place to run them, normally from a central castle, as self-contained 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.


lordship-specific seal, a register of writs among them. Officers might include asteward, 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—thoseof Bohun, Mowbray, Mortimer, and Beauchamp among them—the individualmanors and units were directly answerable to central officers and accountants,presumably because the estates were too geographically compact to warrantthe establishment of an intermediate tier of administration. But on otherinheritances—the vast duchy of Lancaster is the prime example—local unitswere gathered into regional receiverships/stewardships. The headquarters of eachreceivership was normally a local castle: there courts were held, the officers hadtheir 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 gentrystatus from the locality or from the cadre of the lord’s retainers. On some ofthe great estates he increasingly discharged his duties by deputy and his postbecame—especially in the duchy of Lancaster—part of the lord’s patronageportfolio. Thus Sir Richard Burley was appointed steward of Monmouth byGaunt in 1379, but he can have spent little time on his official duties there, sincehe was one of the lord’s confidants and retainers and died on campaign withGaunt in Spain in 1386. Much more crucial in the day-to-day local governanceof the lordship was the receiver (often doubling up as deputy-steward). He wasoften a local cleric or burgess and needed to have a basic mastery of accountingand audit procedures. It was he who kept the local machinery of lordship inworking order and was the recipient of an avalanche of correspondence andvisits from the lord’s central officers. Answerable to the receiver were a wholehost of local officials—bailiff, reeves, parkers, beadles, foresters, and others.They were—and had to be—local men, often the leaders of their own localcommunities. It was on their conduct and honesty that the reputation of lordshipat the local level often depended. That is why the correspondence of the lord’sofficials is brimful of threats and periodic purges; that is also why the terms ofreference of officials were sometimes closely specified and why they were boundover in large recognizances to discharge the duties of their offices properly.But this was not, of course, a problem unique to aristocratic service. Medievalgovernance was based on the one hand on a small cadre of professional officialsand on the other on a very large pool of amateur leaders of local society whoalone had the knowledge, ties, and status to command the obedience of thatsociety. If in the process they lined their own pockets and boosted their ownprestige, that was an inevitable price that had to be paid. And it was a price paidby all lords—king, magnates, and bishops—alike. When the commissionerstried 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. Otway-Ruthven, A History of Medieval Ireland, 183–8; Frame, English Lordship, 24–7.


his explanation was simple: ‘there have been bad and disloyal stewards andbailiffs.’

Integrating the activities of widely dispersed inheritances and coordinating thepolicies and supervision of an assemblage of officials posed daunting adminis-trative problems. Communications were poor and sanctions often ineffective asthey 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 centralcontrol and supervision of local governance be regular and directive. It couldoperate broadly along two channels—those of the written command and of thepersonal visit.

The effectiveness and reach of lordship, so we have insisted, were transformedby the triumph of the written word in governance.²⁵ The aristocratic world oflate medieval England was bound together by a network of correspondence andoral messages entrusted to confidential messengers to a degree which can hardlybe guessed at from the tiny proportion that survives.²⁶ Gossip and greetingswere exchanged between lords and ladies, laymen and ecclesiastics; ears werekept close to the ground for political rumour; favours were requested andpetitions forwarded; good lordship was sought and mutual promises made. Suchcorrespondence 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 ownhand, such as the letter Richard, earl of Arundel (d. 1397) wrote ‘de ma mayn’.²⁷This was private correspondence; but letters were equally crucial if the lord was tokeep in touch with his retainers and followers and to weld them into an effectivecorps of supporters. The accounts of Earl Thomas of Lancaster (d. 1322) areparticularly eloquent in this respect. On 17 April 1319 alone, seventy-two letterswere despatched to members of his affinity, including twenty-three knights, andon 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 placidtimes 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 LordCourtenay in Devon.²⁸

Correspondence kept lords and their followers in regular touch with eachother; but, from the point of view of the current discussion, it is the role of thewritten word in integrating the lord’s inheritance into an effective administrativeand 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.


the king of England sent a regular stream of directives to the sheriffs and officersof 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, itwould be as files of warrants and vouchers which an accounting officer wouldproduce to justify his allowances and expenditure when he appeared beforethe lord’s auditors. One such file in the Mortimer archives (admittedly mainlyreceipts rather than letters) for one year runs to almost a hundred items.²⁹ Itwas, as far as we know, only from the mid fourteenth century that copies ofsuch 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 onlybegins a decade later). They cover a vast range of business: many of them aredirectives from the lord, his council, or his major officers; others are responsesto local petitions and pleas; many are acts of pardon and largesse; quite a feware 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 ofGaunt we know that c.300–400 such letters were sent annually and copied intothe registers.

It may well be that the sheer size of the estates of the Black Prince and Johnof Gaunt meant that the degree of seigniorial supervision and direction of localaffairs was more intense and sophisticated than a smaller inheritance; but all thatwe know of other aristocratic estates—such as those of Fitzalan, Mortimer, andStafford—suggests otherwise. Written directions were underpinned by frequentpersonal visits from the lord’s central officials—coming on a regular basis (as didthe auditors normally twice yearly) or on individual visits, be it singly or in smallgroups or, occasionally, as the lord’s council. Whatever the format of the visit, itbrought the full authority of central investigation and direction to bear on localaffairs.

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 estatesin western Shropshire may serve as an illustration.³⁰ Some of the visits were fora specific purpose: a group of officials spent three days sorting and weighingthe wool from the large Fitzalan flocks in the lordship (a task which was clearlytoo important to be left to local officials); the auditor took eight days and inMay a further four days to audit the accounts there (again suggesting a degree ofthoroughness). Even more impressive are the references to the extended visits ofthe 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.


visiting the Arundel castle at Shrawardine (both in Shropshire) en route; anotherbatch of councillors paid a visit in August and dined together at Shrewsbury. Butthe most impressive visit was one which lasted in total for nine days. It was headedby Sir David Hanmer, chief justice of the King’s Bench and a man retained forhis legal expertise by Arundel,³¹ Sir Stephen Dauntsey, and others. They weremet 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 indicateshow comprehensive and thorough it was: ‘to supervise and determine diversitems of the lord’s affairs and the business of the lord’s lordships of Clemslandand Shropshire and to make arrangements for the healthy governance (salubregubernatione) and fortune of those lordships’. After this extended visit, the localregime in Clun could not have been under any illusion that its every move andaction was subject to close central scrutiny.

These regular local official visits were supplemented occasionally by overviewvisitations of all, or a goodly portion, of the lord’s inheritance. Such visitationswere often headed by the chief steward, the receiver-general, and other keyofficers 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 possiblyto inaugurate the rule of a new earl—shows how comprehensive they couldbe.³² It began in the lordship of Newport in south-east Wales on 11 Mayand proceeded, on a full weekly timetable, via Caw (Shropshire), Stafford,Thornbury (Gloucestershire) and so across the Stafford manors of England toLincolnshire, Northamptonshire, and East Anglia. At each venue officers andtenants submitted petitions, decisions were endorsed on bills, pleas for theremission of arrears were considered, and the state of buildings was reviewed. Itwas investigative, administrative lordship in itinerant action.

The regular high point of this interaction between central direction and localaccountability was the twice-yearly audit (corresponding closely to the timetablefollowed by the royal exchequer). Sometimes (as on the Lancaster estates) suchaudits were conducted regionally; elsewhere (as on the Lacy inheritance) theauditors themselves went on circuit. Thoroughness was the keynote: officers(including the lord’s central officers) were required to submit their accounts wellin advance; court rolls were also submitted; and local accounts were then sealedprior to further inspection by the chief steward.³³ The basic purpose of the auditwas to check on the honesty and competence of the accountant, not to calculatethe yield or profitability of the unit he controlled. That is why historians haveso frequently misread the nature of these accounts. But this did not mean that

³¹ For Hanmer’s career see Davies, Owain Glyn Dwr (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.


auditors confined themselves to this basic task. On the contrary, the audit couldbe a platform from which the lord could be provided with a range of shrewdfinancial advice on the running of his estates.

One critical issue was that of the profitability of the estates in general and ofdemesne farming in particular. The audited account was not designed to yieldsuch information; but from the late thirteenth century onwards, on some lay(Bigod, Clare) as well as monastic estates calculations of profit were being made.³⁴How such calculations were made remains far from clear, since the notes of profitare cryptic in the extreme. Nevertheless they represent an important departurein seigniorial policy, indicating as they do a shift from mere accountability tocalculations of profit. Furthermore, from the 1330s the most advanced aristocraticadministrations—those of Henry, earl of Lancaster (d. 1345), Elizabeth de Burgh(d. 1360), and Richard Fitzalan, earl of Arundel (d. 1376)³⁵—consolidated theindividual valuations of estates into a general valuation of the lord’s inheritance,the valor. By the late fourteenth–early fifteenth century such valors becameincreasingly common on aristocratic estates, including those of Stafford andBeauchamp. We must, it is true, not overestimate them. They are consolidatedstatements of estimated yield in a particular year, based on the details of thelocal accounts; they are not strictly a valuation of the lord’s income, let alone anestimate of his profits. But they do represent a significant attempt—not least ascompared with the documents of the royal exchequer—to provide an overviewof 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 theconsolidated arrears account. Arrears were a perennial problem for medievalauditors; they represented the gap between potential and actual revenue. By nomeans 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’sauditors keep an overview of them and arrange tight schedules for promptrepayment. The consolidated arrears accounts did precisely that. They are oftenimmensely detailed and on the Lancaster estates (and probably elsewhere) werecompiled annually. They are another indication of the thoroughness of seigniorialfinancial 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.


The significance of valors, arrears accounts, and the other documents whichhave been discussed in this chapter extends far beyond a diplomatic study inthe financial archives of the medieval baronage. They represent one of thefew ways we have of measuring the effectiveness, enterprise, and methods ofseigniorial governance. The documentation that survives is but a tithe comparedwith that of royal financial records and even from that tithe we have madea limited selection, while admitting that variety rather than uniformity isthe keynote of baronial archives. But, on balance, there remains little doubtthat the quality and effectiveness of seigniorial administration—when dueallowance has been made for its scale and problems—bears ready comparisonwith the best of royal and ecclesiastic administration. There was little that theofficials of Edward III could have taught the remarkably enterprising cadre ofservants who ran the estates of Elizabeth de Burgh, or those of Richard II, theregiment of officers who administered the vast duchy of Lancaster for John ofGaunt. If we aggregate the great aristocratic estates of the late medieval period,there can be little doubt that they made a very considerable—and regularlyunderrated—contribution to the governance of the British Isles. Their roleneeds to be recognized.


For the records of a household office unique to one lordship, The Havener’sAccounts of the Earldom and Duchy of Cornwall, 1287–1356, ed. M. Kowalski.Devon and Cornwall Record Society, new series, vol. 44 (Exeter, 2001). For theemployment of the same individuals in seigniorial and royal service, P. Brand,‘Stewards, Bailiffs and the Emerging Legal Profession in Later Thirteenth-Century England’, in Lordship and Learning: Studies in Memory of Trevor Aston,ed. R. Evans (Woodbridge, 2004), and P. Brand, ‘A Versatile Legal Administratorand 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 ofRobin 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 Earlsof Norfolk in the Thirteenth Century (Woodbridge, 2005); A. McCormack,The Earldom of Desmond, 1463–1583: The Decline and Crisis of a FeudalLordship (Dublin, 2005), ch. 2; R. Blakely, The Brus Family in England andScotland, 1100–1295 (Woodbridge, 2005), ch. 7; C. Neville, Native Lordshipin 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


Household: Attendance Rolls in the Glynde Archive, MS 3469’, in FourteenthCentury England V, ed. N. Saul (Woodbridge, 2008).

For liberties in the British Isles see the essays in Liberties and Identities in LaterMedieval Britain, ed. M. Prestwich (Woodbridge, 2008). For Irish liberties andWelsh Marcher lordships, R. Frame, ‘Lordship and Liberties in Ireland and Walesc.1170–c.1360’, in Power and Authority in the Middle Ages: Essays in Memory ofRees Davies, ed. H. Pryce and J. Watts (Oxford, 2007).

8Dependence, Service, and Reward

Dependence, service, and reward were fundamental concepts in medieval soci-ety, to a degree which our allegedly egalitarian and democratic mindsets finddifficult to grasp. They operated at every social level and, formally or informally,bound together the different ‘orders’ of society in a complex web of relation-ships—king and subjects, lords and followers, tenants (including unfree tenants)and their manorial masters. But there are problems for the historian in trying tocharacterize the nature and scope of these relationships.

Two in particular may be cited at this prefatory stage. Dependence is avague, elastic concept; it lacks the specificity and ‘hard’ content which makes itamenable to historical analysis and measurement. This alone becomes possiblewhen what we may call the ‘documents of dependence’ begin to survive—suchas the feudal charters of the twelfth century onwards which stipulate the tenurialobligations of vassals to lords or, from the later thirteenth century in particular,the indentures of retinue which specify the terms on which retainers enteredformally into the service of a lord.¹ The appearance of such documents is itself amatter 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 littlewonder that historians have paid such attention to these documents—witness theintensive study of indentures of retinue in late medieval English historiography;they provide a secure documentary foothold in what is otherwise a sea of vagueabstractions. With this, however, comes the danger that we mistake novelty ofdocumentation 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 itsown terms and in furtherance of its own agenda. Historians can become itsprisoners 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. Itis not that they are necessarily important; but they were kept alive in thedocumentation 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 inThirteenth-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.


all, concentration on particular genres of documentation can direct analysis torestricted 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. Beyondthe specific obligations and rewards that it brought for both parties (lord anddependant) lay a whole set of expectations within which it was structuredand interpreted. At its heart, as we have noticed, was an essentially personalrelationship. The acceptance of lordship was inaugurated, often formally andceremonially, 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 androutine; but when we note the vigour with which men such as the Black Princeand John of Gaunt assembled their feudal tenants to perform homage to thempublicly we must surely recognize that this was a relationship which still hadlife and meaning to it. Such life may have been primarily fiscal—the exactionof feudal incidents such as custody, wardship, and marriage; but it was alsoassuredly a visual display of the dependence and control which were at the heartof lordship.

Nor was this insistence on the choreography of personal lordship confined tothe knightly, feudal classes. It applied equally in a modified form down the socialscale. 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.³Other obligations—including the payment of an entry fine—were normallypart of the contract; but in a society where the aural and visual were so crucialin establishing the formality and publicity of relationships, the oath of fealtywas certainly not without significance. It was regularly copied into formularybooks both in England and in Scotland.⁴ It had legal consequence: the tenantwas now in a real sense the lord’s ‘man’: he was subjected to obligations on theone hand, and was entitled to receive protection on the other. That the bondwas essentially personal, not territorial, was particularly clear in a category ofdependants which is well known in Wales and Ireland, and probably likewisein much of upland Britain. In Wales they were known as advowry men: theydid not hold land directly of the lord nor were they members of the kindredand lineage groups from whom the lord collected tributes and renders. Butthey had acknowledged the lord’s personal authority over them, paying him atoken annual sum in recognition of the relationship. To use the term familiarto students of Anglo-Saxon and early medieval lordship, they had commendedthemselves to him. Nor were their numbers trivial: in the lordship of Bromfieldand 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.

Dependence, Service, and Reward 199

such from the lord nor did they pay him rent; but they were certainly within theorbit of his lordship and ultimately justiciable by him.⁵ They were among hisdependants.

It is perhaps from an unexpected quarter—late medieval Scotland—that weare reminded yet again how fundamental was this personal bond of lordshipand dependence, and how its significance did not necessarily decline over time.Some eight hundred ‘bonds of manrent’, as they are termed, have survived fromlate medieval and early modern Scotland. Their significance extends far beyondScotland (though they have been little noticed beyond it) because they open awindow 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 (notvice versa) and in return secured maintenance and protection—with the bondoften extending to the dependant’s kin, men, and friends as well as to himself. Itinvolved no land nor an annuity or pension as such. It corresponded closely to thehomage of the feudal oath and as such dwelt in the world of ‘the intangible, thepersonal relationships between lords and their men’,⁶ the baseline of all lordshipand dependency.

Such a relationship operated at a collective and communal, as well as at apersonal and individual, level. When a new lord visited his lordship—whetherit came to him by inheritance or by royal grant—he inaugurated his arrival byinsisting on a public acknowledgement of his lordship (just as the king did so bythe 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 essenceand format they were not replicated elsewhere in the British Isles. The first tookplace at Wrexham (lordship of Bromfield and Yale in north-east Wales) in 1284when the heir of the earl of Surrey took formal possession of the lordship—andwith it the service of its inhabitants—from his father. Twenty-nine leadingmen of the lordship did homage to their new lord individually, followed bya communal act of homage by the rest of the tenants ‘with hands raised andjoined unanimously’.⁷ This splendid spectacle was repeated in another great andvaluable lordship, Brecon, in 1302, when royal commissioners formally tookseisin of the lordship on behalf of the king (in a deal he had made with the earl ofHereford) and took the fealty of two thousand Welshman through an interpreter.Even more impressive was the way that Edward, the Black Prince, inaugurated hisrule in north Wales—and doubtless through the rest of his principality lands in1343. His commissioners travelled around each district, assembling the leadingmen and requiring an oath of fealty from them (reminiscent of the Ragman Rollof 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.


who had submitted to Edward I).⁸ Likewise when the relationship between thelord and his dependants was fractured, it had to be formally and visually repairedin a great public act of contrition and reaffirmation. So it was, to take anotherWelsh example, that in March 1414 a series of assemblies was held in northWales—there were said to be 600 men present at the one at Bala—in which thelocal community apologized for its rebellion and renewed its personal submissionto its lord, the king.⁹

What was basically entered into in such a relationship was a set of abstractcommitments (to which specific obligations could, of course, be added). As withfriendship, so with dependence it was a human bond and obligation which wasat its heart. It came as no surprise that it borrowed the vague terminology ofan earlier age. To be faithful (fidelis) was the prime obligation, and what thatentailed was the giving of aid (auxilium) and advice (consilium), two of theoldest and vaguest words in the lexicon of medieval dependence.¹⁰ There wastalk of the lord’s ‘honour’ and ‘right’ and the need to uphold and defend themand of ‘taking the lord’s part in all his actions’. There was even an echo of thelanguage of family sentiments and the ethic of friendship—of the need for thedependant to show ‘good cousinship and total benevolence’ (bonecousinage etentiere naturesse).¹¹

The relationship between lord and dependant varied hugely, of course,according to the relative status and powers of the two parties. Between nearequals it was close to an alliance; between lord and tenant it was very much dehaut en bas—‘humble and obedient in body and chattels’ as a serf might bedescribed. But even the serf was the serf of the lord, nativus domini; and therewas an element of mutuality in the relationship. Lordship and dependence wereconstructed around this expectation of mutuality. Protection was the baselineobligation due from the lord. As a German legal handbook put it directly: ‘weshould serve our lords for they protect us; if they do not protect us, justicedoes not oblige us to serve them.’¹² Nor was such a promise of protectionmerely an idle boast. The letters of the Black Prince, for example, are full ofthe bluster and threats which he directed at those—including the archdeaconof Cornwall—who dared to extort money from his tenants or did not payfor their goods.¹³ At all levels of society, protection—whether open or keptunder wraps—was one of the most treasured facets of lordship. We should notunderestimate its significance because it does not correspond to our notions ofpublic order and governance.

⁸ The fealty roll of 1343 for Wales is published in Archaeologia Cambrensis: Original DocumentsPrinted as a Supplement to the Journal. Vol 1, (London, 1877), cxlviii–clxxv.

⁹ See Davies, Owain Glyn Dwr, 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.


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 haveformal documentation of its existence. Of course, the reach of lordship extendedmuch further than those who, according to the late medieval evidence, were inreceipt of annuities or formally retained by a lord. Sometimes lords could blurtout the scope of their influence, even among the knightly classes. There washardly a knight, so the earl of Leicester boasted, whom he could not overthrowif he refused the earl aid.¹⁴ It is a comment which could have been echoed downthe centuries and across the British Isles. The format of the dependence variedand 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 correspondedto 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 aseries of concentric circles with the earl at the centre’.¹⁶ This definition canserve as a general point of introduction to the range and scope of aristocraticdependence. Historians have, on the whole, compartmentalized their discussionsof the operation of lordship within self-contained segments—from, for example,the groups of retainers (knights, gentry, and esquires by and large) who composedthe lord’s indentured retinue, to the large groups of tenants and their families wholived on his manors/lordship and were financially and judicially answerable to himand his officials. Clearly the distinction between these groups of dependants—andthe other groups between the two polarities—was huge and so, therefore, wasthe nature of lordship exercised over them. But equally we would be mistakennot to take note of the continuum that was involved in lordship at all social andeconomic levels. Just as our understanding of royal lordship should bring withinits embrace the whole way in which a king’s authority and power (especiallyin England) impinged on all his subjects as well as his relationship with hismagnates, so our interpretation of aristocratic lordship should be ecumenical.French historians have even tried to estimate the actual numbers of men whocontributed to the resources of a seigneurie—1,800 being justiciable and 1,040persons owing rent on one such seigneurie in Champagne.¹⁷

It is with this broad-based aspect of dependence that we begin. Lordship overmen, 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.


of tributary dues, food renders, and entertainment obligations.¹⁸ This patternmay have been substantially overlaid, especially in the lowlands, by other claimsand relationships, notably dues from land and all that came in their wake. Butif we take the British Isles as a whole what is striking (especially in the west anduplands) is the centrality of the leadership of men as a feature of lordship. Thuswhen King David II of Scotland transferred three named sheriffdoms to William,Lord Douglas, he bestowed upon him—in a significant phrase—‘the leading ofthe 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 thatthey held land tenurially of the lord, but most were not: it was simply that theylived within the orbit of the lord’s power and were thereby beholden, directly orindirectly, to him—at least when he made demands of them. Their relationshipwith the lord was often at one or indeed several removes: they might belongto lineage groups which acknowledged the lord’s ultimate superiority or theymight 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, wehear of ‘captain of the nation’, ‘principal of his nation’, ‘tam de natione quamde familia’. Some of these terms were restricted to the western British Isles; butothers were not. And at the root of many of them lies an echo of the vocabularyof family and kin leadership, some of the oldest features of lordship itself.

The ‘leadership of men’ dimension of lordship has tended to be underestimatedby historians, partly because it was not tied to specific obligations but rather toa broad pool of contingency support and partly, no doubt, because in Englandin particular it operated within a framework of royal lordship and control. But itnever lay far below the surface of the power structure of medieval society. Whena lord wished to raise an army to display his power (and possibly to serve theking) it was to this pool of men that he turned. So, for example, did EdmundMortimer, earl of March (d. 1381), whose military recruitment for the 1375Breton expedition has been cited above.²⁰ So even more obviously were theforces which the earls and great lords of Scotland and Ireland assembled in whatwere in effect ‘lands of war’. Even in ‘lands of peace’ (as England certainly wasin comparison) a lord could bare the teeth of his power, in periods of politicalturbulence, 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’scoup in summer 1399. The surviving local Lancastrian accounts show vividlyhow he deployed the resources and contents of his estates (those of his late father

¹⁸ See above, pp. 159–61. ¹⁹ Brown, Black Douglases, 49.²⁰ See above, pp. 129–30.


and of his wife) to coordinate the downfall of Richard II.²¹ Similarly over acentury earlier, when Edward I had tried to destabilize the power of Humphreyde Bohun, earl of Hereford, his agents had to report that his efforts were afailure, for the men of Earl Humphrey had stood solidly with their lord. EarlHumphrey 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 ofroyal bluster and bribes—was the return on good lordship.²²

Even short of such dangerous confrontations, a powerful aristocratic lordcould deploy his pool of supporters to promote his interests in a ruthless fashion.When the Percies and the Cliffords were preparing for their showdown withHenry IV in 1403–4, the constable of Bamburgh reported how their knightshad ‘procured to themselves a great multitude of your men and given themlivery of the crescents [the Percy livery] and have sworn to keep the castlesagainst you and all others’.²³ The Percies were, of course, involved in full-scalerebellion; but even in much more local disputes the ‘support of the lord’smen’ could prove truly menacing. Thomas Herbert must have been relievedwhen a force of forty-five men and horses rode from Lichfield, Maxtoke, andAtherston to threaten his enemies. By the mid 1440s the situation was evenmore volatile: the duke of Buckingham summoned various knights, esquires,gentlemen, and others from Kent and Surrey to come to meet him and anothergroup of at least sixty-six persons to ride in support of his cause from Kent toEssex.²⁴

Examples such as these are legion, especially by the time we reach the moreabundant documentary sources of the fifteenth century. They are, very properly,cited in discussions of the onset of civil war and the perversion of the normalprocesses of justice. But they also, from the present perspective, cast light on thesources and assumptions of aristocratic power and on the way that great lordscould manipulate the resources of dependent lordship to further their powerand ambitions. Nor would the magnates have been in the least embarrassed byproclaiming as much; theirs was a social, even governmental, superiority whichwas part of the natural order and, within limits, deserved recognition and respect.The point was made most diplomatically by Bishop Russell in his draft sermonin 1483 when he declared that ‘the polityk rule of every region wele ordeignedstondithe in the nobles.’ The duke of Norfolk, in a passage already cited, was agood deal more forthright: ‘We lete yow wete [know] that nexst the kynge oursoverayn 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.


and governance throwh all this schir.’²⁵ He had doffed his cap to the king’sultimate authority; but in every other respect what he was claiming was nothingless (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 veryouter 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 bestspasmodic 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 onhis own country. Dependence in the minor orbit of the lord’s authority wasa very different matter. It was often a matter of daily or weekly service, ofregular obligations and regular rewards. These were the troupes of servants andmenials—valets, pages, grooms, nursemaids, and others—who provided thebasic services of the ‘household below stairs’ and attended to the multifariousdomestic needs of the household.²⁶ They often numbered somewhere between80 and 100 per noble household. The vast majority were nameless, living inthe household and travelling with it; but the bequests in aristocratic wills showthat occasionally, and not unsurprisingly, a bond of affection grew up betweenthem and the lord. Higher up the echelon of service, and sometimes bound byofficial indentures, came a group of followers who recommended themselves fortheir professional skills as cooks, masons, clarioners, trumpeters, bargemen, andso forth. It was in this spirit, no doubt, that Master William Holme, king’sphysician, was retained for life receiving £10 per annum, robes with fur, andother allowances.²⁷ Such men were not resident at the lord’s household on aregular basis, but within reason were at his beck and call when their serviceswere required; they wore his livery, especially when on his service, and oftendrew a regular annuity or reward. Alongside them we should place key estate andhousehold officials, some of whom, as we have seen, were more or less full-timeprofessionals, some key local officials, and the lord’s councillors. The livery rollof the earl of Devon for 1384–5 included eighty-two names, ranging from sevenknights to three ladies in waiting and six pages. And we need to recall that theearl 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 isa group which is represented on the payroll of all major aristocrats.²⁹ Manyof 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 Supplementno. 4, 1978) and Ramsay, ‘Retained Legal Counsel’.


many minor administrative and legal officials, including doorkeepers and clerks,were paid regular, if normally modest, fees in the hope, no doubt, that theywould expedite the lord’s business. When we learn, to take a single examplefrom many, that in 1384 among the lawyers who were feed (admittedlymodestly) by the earl of Stafford were some of the leading legal luminariesof the day—including Sir Robert Belknap, Sir Robert Plessington, Sir DavidHanmer, Robert Charleton—as well as a clerk of the bench, we realize howentrenched and extensive was the habit of protecting the aristocracy’s legal flankin advance of litigation.³⁰ It is a practice which attracted—especially in respectof royal judges—a great deal of contemporary criticism and was substantiallycurtailed—at least as far as judges were concerned—by the end of the fourteenthcentury. Historians have, understandably, been equally suspicious: retaining royaljudges and other feed lawyers seems a particularly reprehensible example of thecorruption 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 claimthat justice was perverted by the abuse of aristocratic influence). But in thepresent context it is worth making two observations. The first is the self-evidenttruth that in a world where disputes were generally settled by litigation and wherethe title to land was regularly under challenge, the need to have ready access toprofessional 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 exclusivelycommitted. That did not necessarily guarantee their neutrality; but it needs tobe set alongside the assumption that these men were in the pocket of a particularlord. The case of Sir David Hanmer, chief justice of the King’s Bench in the1380s, illustrated the point: his portfolio of fees included retainers from John ofGaunt, 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 Davidwas certainly ecumenical in the way he dispensed his legal expertise and collectedhis rewards.³¹

The various groups which we have hitherto classified under the vague formulaof the lord’s dependants did indeed form ‘a series of concentric circles’ whichranged from those who were daily and menial employees, through those whoseprofessional services as lawyers, masons, or officers made their assistance desirable,and on to the crowds of supporters from the lord’s ‘country’ who answered hisbeck and call as the occasion arose. But there was another group of dependantswhich 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.


subject. This group is often known as the lord’s affinity. It consisted for themost part of client gentry, men of independent means and standing in their ownlocalities and counties, but bound by ties of dependence to a lord, or to morethan one lord.

It is not difficult to understand why the lord’s affinity has been the focusof such close historiographical attention, especially for late medieval England.Substantively, it represents the obvious point of entry into the world of dependentaristocratic bonds, the complex links which connected the various ‘orders’ ofgentle society, and thereby into the whole vexed issue conjured by the phrase‘bastard feudalism’ and with it the social and political dynamics of late medievalsociety. This is why the issue has occupied centre stage especially since theappearance of K. B. McFarlane’s classic study of 1945, followed by a host ofindividual and general studies.³² Compiling lists of members of the affinity,and thereafter tracing their careers and the web of their connections, gives atexture to our understanding of the character of political society at county andregional level, which is impossible for earlier periods; the survival from the latethirteenth century of a genre of document which specifies in detailed writtenform the obligations of lord and the members of the affinity in a precise andunprecedented fashion is clearly hugely significant. The document in questionis, of course, the private indenture for life service in peace and war. More than150 of these indentures survive in England and Ireland for the two centuries1278–1476 and have been gathered together in an exemplary edition. They area 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 SimonWalker shrewdly pointed out,³³ ‘an indenture of retinue merely formalized andrecorded, for a specific occasion, the unwritten rules by which they (those retainedby formal written indenture) always lived.’ Nor need we assume that the formalindenture was by any means unusual in its usage. Apart from the usual problem ofrates of survival of such private documents, we need to recall that it may not havebeen favoured by all aristocratic families or in all areas—though the survival of aconsiderable number of examples, and early ones, from parts of English Irelandis a timely reminder that this area (so often overlooked by English historians) waswithin the same social-cultural aristocratic world as England itself and borrowedits habits quickly and readily. Above all, perhaps, we need to recall that the rangeof aristocratic dependence extended far beyond the small numbers of those forwhom formal indentures happen to survive. There were many dependants whowere 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 otherstudies two general overviews may be cited: Bean, From Lord to Patron, and M. Hicks, BastardFeudalism (London, 1995). An exceptional book about an exceptional affinity is Walker, LancastrianAffinity.

³³ Walker, Lancastrian Affinity, 9.


To take a late example, it has been pointed out that only 31 out of 141 knownannuitants of the duke of Buckingham (d. 1460) had their tenure of serviceregulated by indenture of retinue.³⁴

In spite of these caveats and others which may be added to them, the indenturesof retinue do provide a valuable list of what were increasingly considered, onlegal advice, as the basic terms and conditions of service between lord anddependant. Especially was this so by the second half of the fourteenth century assuch indentures became increasingly, though by no means totally, uniform andwere no doubt copied into seigniorial formularies. They were bilateral contractsfor life service in peace and in war as opposed to short-term contracts for aspecified period or to raise troops for a specific expedition; they laid down theobligations of the retainer, in peace and war: they specified the rewards dueto the retainer, typically an annuity or rent in land, and the rights of lodgingand food he and some of his followers could claim when he attended the lord’shousehold (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 tobe compensated or shared. They were formally validated contracts and as suchenforceable at law. Beneath these broad terms there were, of course, variationsin the conditions: on issues such as the obligations of the retainer, which mightinclude attendance in parliament, tournaments, or crusades, and in rates ofreward. The latter—as with so much else in gentle society—became increasinglytied to rank: often £20 or 20 marks (£13 6s. 8d .) for a knight and £10 for asquire, with a proviso that the higher rate might be paid if the status of theretainer changed.

Beneath the neat formulae of the indentures, there was—one suspects—rathermore negotiation than meets the documentary eye. We catch a fascinatingglimpse, for example, of a would-be retainer petitioning for a contract; buthaving to be told that the lord had a waiting list of such requests and that therewas in effect a freeze on such grants for two years.³⁵ Retainers might also laydown limitations on their terms of service: in 1317 (no. 15)³⁶ John Darcy, inconcluding an agreement with Aymer de Valence, earl of Pembroke (d. 1324),reserved the right to serve with whichever lord he wished at tournaments, andadded that if the earl wished for his service on such an occasion he was obligedto offer Darcy as much as he could gain from any other lord. Likewise Sir JohnRussel 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 theearl himself served in person. Clearly there was hard bargaining at work. Somuch 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’.


of a petulant petitioner. In a famous letter of 1478 Lord Strange spelt out theposition unambiguously to Sir William Stonor: ‘I woll not be ovirmastred withnone of my feedmen . . . yf ye dele as ye owght I vrolbe your goode lorde, andeke I dare better displese yow than ye me.’³⁷ Occasionally, indentures of servicewere part of a broader set of agreements: so it was that when Hugh Despenserretained Sir Peter Ovedale, the deal also involved the marriage of Sir Peter toHugh’s sister (no. 22).

The opportunities and benefits of indentures served the interest of bothparties. The lord secured a definitive statement of the retainer’s obligations. Hisability to attract men of good local standing displayed his pulling power inthe local community; they were his eyes, ears, and supporters within it. Theretainers could be expected, even required, to attend the lord on great publicoccasions—parliament or a tournament or ‘other assemblies’, again in a visualreminder of the lord’s appeal. When he assembled an expeditionary force, atthe core would be retainers permanently bound to him to serve; they in turncould, and did, serve as his recruiting officers, so as Bean has emphasized, ‘a greathousehold was composed, in part, of some smaller households absorbed withinthe greater one where their lords attended their lords.’³⁸ It is at the domestic levelthat the role of such retainers is arguably most elusive. We must not assume thattheir 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 calendarand whenever they were summoned. They acted, alongside others, as his ‘naturalcouncillors’. It is striking, for example, how often some of the retainers of thehouse of Mortimer witness the key transactions of the family—endowing amonastery or arranging a marriage deal. None of these obligations was peculiarto indentured retainers but they formed an obvious group on whose services hecould contractually rely.

For the retainer the advantages were even more self-evident. He was no longera ‘floater’, needing to make an introduction and a request to a lord on eachoccasion. He could expect to have rights of access, directly or indirectly, to hislord’s patronage and support, and not only for himself but in turn also for hisown dependants and even their dependants.³⁹ He was in receipt of the lord’slivery or badge—a visual expression of his attachment and a reminder to all ofthe patronage he enjoyed. He would normally be in receipt of an annuity, whichcould often be a substantial addition to his income. He could offer his militarysupport 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).


royal patronage in his favour.⁴⁰ In addition the dependant could tap into thefund 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 powerfulpatron.

Men who were important enough to be the subject of a life contract werealready people of standing in their own local societies or in their own careersor professions. Detailed studies of some of the best-documented noble affinitiesof the period—among them those of Thomas of Lancaster, John of Gaunt, theearl of Devon, Elizabeth de Burgh, and the Beauchamps—have established thebroad character and recruitment base of such affinities. It is not in the leastsurprising that many of them were bound together by family ties and had servedthe lord and his descendants over two or three generations. At least seventeenof the identifiable annuitants of Duke Henry of Grosmont (d. 1361) passedinto the service of John of Gaunt, and John of Gaunt in turn built upon affinityfor his son, Henry Bolingbroke, in part from the ranks of his own knightsand esquires. A good number of others were drawn from the lord’s estatesand even from the broader ‘country’ which was his sphere of influence. Thiswas a natural catchment area and helped to shape the geographical characterof the affinity: the Courtenays, for example, concentrated their recruitmentin Devon and the Percies in Northumberland; but a really great lord suchas Gaunt spread his recruiting net much further, concentrating, it is true,initially in Lancashire and Yorkshire, but expanding over the decades intothe midlands, East Anglia, and beyond. Between 1370 and 1378—when theevidence is particularly rich—his retainers were drawn from twenty-two differentcounties.⁴¹

Recruitment was not confined by history or geography. Ambitious young menwere in search of good lords and vice versa. A letter of recommendation froman existing member of the affinity might do the trick; so would talks of militaryprowess or the recommendation of a powerful patron. Both parties had to workat the relationship—to establish it and to keep it in good heart. Lords had toprove their worship as much as retainers their service. If a retainer wished to offerhis 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 yourpermission. . . . Rather grant him your good lordship (bone seigneurie) as he verymuch wishes to have it.’⁴² This was the world of the formation of the aristocraticaffinity.

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.


The aristocratic affinity and the indenture of life service have been at the centreof much of the historical discussion of late medieval lordship and in particular ofwhat has been characterized, generally pejoratively, as ‘bastard feudalism’. Theyhave been seen as part of the cancer in the body politic, as a manifestation ofthe disruptive influence of so-called over-mighty magnates in the local, regional,and national life of late medieval society, especially in England. We are notcalled upon here to enter into these debates, but in the light of our broad-brushdiscussion of the nature and dynamics of aristocratic dependence, some of theissues deserve an airing from such a perspective, rather than from that of thehistorical pathology of late medieval English political society.

Perhaps the oldest charge against the aristocratic affinity is that it representedthe distortion, the bastardization, of the healthy relationship between lord andman which had been at the heart of the original, pristine, ‘feudal’ bond. Thereward of land was replaced by that of money; exclusive loyalty to one lordby cynically multiple commitments to several. These charges—both of whichhave substance in terms of money-rewards and multiple service—have longbeen shown to be based on a false and idealized contrast between ‘feudal’ and‘bastard feudal’ relationships. Men of the status of indentured retainers werenot Pavlovian dogs, responding unilaterally and exclusively to the commandof a lord. A valued retainer would not find it difficult to secure contracts ofservice, annuities, and rewards from more than one lord; likewise an ambitiouslord would not be inhibited from seeking the service of a valued prospectiveretainer even though he had an existing link with another lord. Nor—contraryto common opinion—would such multiple loyalties have put a strain on theretainer’s choice of loyalties, at least in normal circumstances. In relatively stablepolitical societies—such as late medieval England was for the most part—and ina 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 wherea single lord enjoyed a monopoly of control; multiple service was a reflection ofthe kaleidoscopic and fragmented character of aristocratic lordship.

There is one other point which should be made on this issue.⁴³ It is temptingto interpret the careers and behaviour of indentured retainers mainly or evenexclusively in terms of their vertical relationships with their lord, as membersof 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 menof 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 serviceof their lord. Much of their time would be devoted to their own estates andaffairs, dealing with neighbours and tenants, pursuing their family ambitions andstrategies, 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’.


campaigns, and answering the commands of the king. It was within this broadcontext that their lives were conducted and their decisions made, not in a one-eyed, automatic, knee-jerk obedience to their obligations, however important, totheir lord. Men such as Sir Peter de la Mare, steward and retainer of the earl ofMarch, or Sir Andrew Sackville, likewise household steward of an earlier earl ofMarch, or Sir George Felbrigg who is to be found, sometimes simultaneously, inthe 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 totheir indentured lords were only one of the many strands which went into themaking of their careers and decisions. For the most part—and except possibly attimes of high political drama—neither they nor their lords found it difficult tobalance these various claims to their satisfaction.

In the lexicon of the late medieval period, again especially in England, twoother terms have come to be part of the shorthand for the malaise of aristocraticlordship—livery and maintenance. Both are topics which need not commandour attention in detail, since they have been the subject of excellent historicaldiscussions.⁴⁵ Attention will be confined to what these two contemporaryexplosive issues reveal about perceptions of aristocratic lordship and changingviews of its code of conduct in late medieval society.

Livery, the granting out of cloth by a lord in his distinctive colours and at hisexpense to his dependants, was an unexceptional and long-standing feature ofwhat may be called displayed dependence. As such it was no different from othergifts and rewards that any lord expected to give and a retainer to receive. BishopRobert Grosseteste (d. 1253) of Lincoln was no worshipper at the altar of secularworldly conventions but he had no doubt of the importance of livery. ‘Orderyour knights and your gentlemen who wear your livery (vos robes) that theyought to wear that same livery every day, and especially at your table and in yourpresence to uphold your honour.’⁴⁶ The distribution of livery, once or twice a yearnormally, was one of the key visual rituals of lordship. The quality of the clothand its length were strictly regulated by status and reinforced the hierarchicaldistinctions between the lord’s dependants. The lord’s top officials—includinghis legal advisers and members of his council—were dressed in his livery; but soalso, 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 ProvincialLife, 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 theintroduction by G. L. Harriss to McFarlane, England in the Fifteenth century. I have also benefitedfrom reading McFarlane’s unpublished lectures—his last set of lectures in Trinity term 1966, inMagdalen College Oxford archives—on lords and retainers.

⁴⁶ Walter of Henley’s Husbandry: Together with an Anonymous Husbandry, Seneschaucie, and RobertGrosseteste’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.


collars, badges, caps, and hoods in the later fourteenth century—represented aconsiderable investment in the politics of display. The two surviving livery rollsfor our period are for a lord and lady who were not key figures in the powerpolitics of their day; even so the list of those in receipt of Elizabeth de Burgh’slivery in 1340 extended to 272 persons, that of Edward Courtenay, earl of Devon,to 135 persons. These were paltry numbers as compared to extravagant numbersof livery distributed by Earl Thomas of Lancaster: he spent £1,080 under thisheading in 1313–14 and £687 in 1318–19. His officers purchased the clothfrom London merchants and had it transported to Pontefract to be tailored intoliveries. Earl Thomas was spending inordinately in unusual circumstances; sowas Bolingbroke’s receiver-general in the summer of 1399 when he distributed192 gilt collars.⁴⁸

It is not difficult to envisage how a group of liveried followers posed anintimidating threat. Gangs of such followers hid behind the skirts of their lord’sprotection and readily abused their status. It is no wonder that Gaunt’s followersthought that their badges would give them the earth and the sky—howevermuch Gaunt himself may have sought to curb their boasts and activities. Gauntat 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’sleading chamber knights, in the 1380s was centred on the claim that he issued220 robes every Christmas—when he was not a great lord with a great income.Likewise in parliament in January 1404 the earl of Northumberland admittedto ‘the gederying of power, and yevyng of liverees’ in his recent conflict withthe king.⁴⁹

By the mid–late fourteenth century the indiscriminate distribution of liveryhad come to be seen, among the new aristocratic gentle classes, as the unacceptableand oppressive face of irresponsible lordship and as a root cause of disorder. Avigorous 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 muchan attempt to prohibit the distribution of livery as to define who was able to grantit (magnates) and who to receive and wear it (knights and esquires retained bylife indenture and resident household servants).⁵⁰ What is of interest to us in thepresent context is what these debates and arguments reveal about the fracturingof views about the nature and exercise of aristocratic lordship. The attitude of thegreat magnates was brusquely summed up in 1384 in John of Gaunt’s dismissivecomment that he was well able to control and discipline his own men; it wasechoed 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 andthe Abolition of Badges’, Parliamentary History, 9 (1990), 302–15.


liveries given by badges and hoods. But the Commons and their allies were not tobe browbeaten so easily. They persisted in their campaign and it bore a measureof legislative fruit. What we catch here is a glimpse of the cross-currents whichinevitably flowed in a complex body politic. Both parties respected, and didnot challenge, the power of the vertical claims of aristocratic lordship, properlyexercised, especially on those who were in a menial, contractual, and/or long-termdependence on a lord. That after all was, as it had been for centuries, part of thecement of a hierarchical society. But such dependence had to operate both withina framework of (changing) conventions of behaviour and in a society whichwas, at the level of gentry/lairds and above, sophisticated and multi-textured andfar more complex than merely one of aristocratic power and dependence. Thiswas 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 whoplayed the games of power on its stage.⁵¹

The other word which regularly featured in any analysis of the malaise of latemedieval lordship was ‘maintenance’. It referred to the improper and excessivesupport which a lord could give to a client or dependant in the pursuit of hiscase, legal or otherwise. Here again our interest is centred on what the issue canreveal about perceptions of late-medieval aristocratic lordship and the frameworkof conventions within which it had to operate. Historians have done a greatdeal 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 beingseen as part of contemporary polemic and explored within the context of othercontemporary practices. After all, at one level ‘maintenance’ was the residuarylegatee of an age-old expectation that the lord would, indeed should, further hisclient’s quarrel—through distraint, force, pillage, even feud if necessary—andshould do so as an obligation of honour, especially in a society very considerablygrounded on self-help and help by lord, family, and ‘friends’. Then again it isrecognized that the mechanisms of ‘maintenance’ worked alongside the normalprocesses of litigation and court procedure, seeking no doubt to accelerate andinfluence them, but not working directly against them or challenging theirauthority.

In spite of the assumptions of the modern outlook, ‘maintenance’ was notnecessarily regarded as a covert, reprehensible activity. Conducted within therules, 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, aidand maintain (juvare, fovere et mauntenere) Sir Richard de Burgh in all his justquarrels, as a lord ought to help, aid and maintain his knight or his vassal’.⁵² Solikewise 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 totry to get aristocratic lordship in perspective.’

⁵² ‘Private Indentures’, no. 44.


and in return to take the lord’s part in all his actions. So it was that ‘goodlordship’ could be translated simply as ‘maintenance’.⁵³

The evidence of how such ‘maintenance’ was deployed to support a client isamply documented both from private correspondence (especially in the fifteenthcentury) 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 occasionaldisplay of physical force as a lord or his officers or even his council led a troop ofhis tenants to ‘attend’ a local court. More common were rather less intimidatingploys: ‘labouring’ juries, and officials such as sheriff, distributing gifts includingrobes, wine, and food, identifying would-be supporters and possible opponents.These games were played by all and sundry: cities, such as Norwich and King’sLynn, 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 practiceswere endemic in a society which lacked a substantial professional bureaucracy,local and central, and where seeking ‘preference’ was an acknowledged way ofspeeding up procedures and oiling the wheels of a sclerotic machine—be it inthe 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 asalways loaded in favour of the more powerful—then it might even be said tobe, at least in theory, self-cancelling with one litigant’s ‘bribe’ being trumped bythat of his opponent. Contemporaries were certainly fully apprised of how thesystem was ‘played’: Denholm-Young many years ago published a fascinatinglist of the kind of objections which could be used to challenge jurors—such asaffinity, 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 suchcharges often isolate ‘maintenance’ from the legal and social context in which itoperated, including a context in which arbitration (especially by great aristocrats)was often a better guarantee of the restoration of social peace and a modicum ofgood order than the interminable tergiversations and contrived delays of strictjudicial process.

Furthermore, as with livery, so with ‘maintenance’ there was a recognitionthat the system could be abused. ‘Misrule’ was dangerous to ‘good lordship’;it undermined its reputation. When the lord promised to ‘maintain’ his clienthe always did so scrupulously in his just causes. Thus when the fourth earl ofDouglas gave an annuity in 1407 to Herbert Maxwell he promised ‘to supowelleand defende [him] in all his ryghtwys cause, als we awe to our man and ourkosyn’.⁵⁵ Great lords were jealous of their reputations and could be fastidiousabout 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.


noted how a justice excused himself from a case because one of the parties wasstaying with him, that juries should be empanelled from men who were not alliedto either party, and that since the plaintiff ’s father was the sheriff, other officersought to be appointed for the occasion.⁵⁶ Indeed, if a client abused the lord’smaintenance the consequences could be dire: when John of Gaunt found thathis feodary for Lancashire was guilty of maintenance, he fined him £200 andbanned him from Gaunt’s court and presence for life.⁵⁷

Much late medieval English historical scholarship on the aristocracy has con-centrated on the affinity; on its composition, size, role in local and nationalaffairs, and its responsiveness to the lord’s policies and demands. Arguably, ithas received too much attention. Most aristocratic affinities—in the sense ofmen under indentured contract for life—were not large. That of John of Gaunt,about which we are exceptionally well informed, was totally unusual in standingin 1387 at 173, of whom 7 were bannerets, 70 knights, and 96 esquires. This wasthe affinity of a prince and titular king. Even Thomas of Lancaster—extravagantin so many respects in his retaining—was not in the same league. Earl Thomasof 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 asimportant a measure as were numbers. Equally indicative is the fact that ingeneral—Gaunt again being the outstanding exception in spending £4,000 bythe 1390s on the cost of his retinue—most magnates spent 10 per cent or lessof 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 theaffinity as a feature of aristocratic lordship.⁵⁸

Nor would we expect the affinity to have, or demonstrate, a clear corporateidentity. It consisted of a group of individuals recruited into the lord’s serviceat different points in time. Beyond this commitment to him, their lives andcareers had their own trajectories and priorities. But they were drawn from thesame 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 bedetermined by individual circumstances—his personal standing, his personaland military ambitions, the openings afforded to him. Our tendency, perhaps, isto underrate these claims and the element of real personal affection and devotionwhich could underpin them. When Sir Richard Barley, the marshal of John ofGaunt’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 harnessof 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.


bequeathed a great gilt-covered cup embellished with her father’s arms to the earlof Arundel and a matins book to his eldest son, we catch a glimpse of the worldwhich lies beyond the aridities of the formal indentures of retinue.⁵⁹

Furthermore, though the affinity was for much of the time a loose body offollowers, it did enjoy moments when it operated corporately. It would do so,no doubt, on grand social occasions of the Christian calendar when the lordwould summon his dependants to dine and lodge with him, or when he set outfor a tournament, parliament, a wedding or a funeral. More menacingly, theonset of political trouble or a military expedition might prompt the retinue to besummoned to display the lord’s standing. In 1378 Earl Edmund of March gavefourteen days’ notice to his retinue (pro retinencia suo munienda) before he setout for Scotland; in the stressful circumstances of the early years of Henry IV’sreign, the earl of Stafford summoned his retinue to come to help him to suppressThomas Holland’s revolt and then to contribute to campaigns in Scotland andWales; or, to cite a final example, in 1436 the earl of Warwick travelled fromAbergavenny ‘to have discussions for twelve days with his retinue (cum retinenciasua) prior to his journey to Flanders’.⁶⁰ Failure to respond to such summonsescould lead to the cancellation of the contract and the annuity: some of the BlackPrince’s dependants found that to their cost and so did those who failed to turnup to support the king at the battle of Shrewsbury in 1403.⁶¹

All in all, we should perhaps not underestimate the significance of the affinityas a window into the world of aristocratic dependence. It does at least providea fairly secure documentary foothold in a world of suggestive guesses. But oneneeds to recognize that what the affinity represents is the tip of an iceberg ofextensive formal and informal circles of dependence, reward, and service whichwere a central feature of late medieval lordship, both aristocratic and royal. Ifthose circles were effectively and sensitively managed by the lord and his ménage,and if tensions between individuals and groups within and across the lord’saffinity (broadly described) were addressed, then both the interest of the lordand general social and political harmony would be promoted. That was indeed avery tall order. Lordship, good lordship, was, like kingship, a hugely demandingideal.⁶²


For the Black Prince and his clients, D. Green, ‘Political Service with Edward theBlack 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.’


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, TheKing, the Crown, and the Duchy of Lancaster: Public Authority and Private Power,1399–1461 (Oxford, 2000); A. Dunn, The Politics of Magnate Power in Englandand Wales 1389–1413 (Oxford, 2003); A. Grundy, ‘The Earl of Warwick andthe Royal Affinity in the Politics of the West Midlands, 1389–1399’, in TheFifteenth Century II: Revolution and Consumption in Late Medieval England, ed.M. Hicks (Woodbridge, 2001). For gentry attitudes, P. Coss, The Origins of theEnglish Gentry (Cambridge, 2003) and Gentry Culture in Late Medieval England,ed. R. Radulescu and A. Truelove (Manchester, 2005). For the participationof towns in the system of maintenance, C. Liddy, War, Politics and Financein 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 andW. M. Ormrod (Cambridge, 2006); D. Biggs, ‘Henry IV and his JP’s [sic]: TheLancastrianisation of Justice, 1399–1413’, in Traditions and Transformations inLate 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 LateMedieval Scotland, 1314–1475’, in The Fifteenth Century I: Concepts andPatterns of Service in the Later Middle Ages, ed. A. Curry and E. Matthew(Woodbridge, 2000). For dependence in Gaelic society, S. Kingston, Ulsterand the Isles in the Fifteenth Century: The Lordship of the Clann Domhnaill ofAntrim (Dublin, 2004); H. L. MacQueen, ‘Survival and Success: The Kennedysof 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-WesternMunster’, Journal of Medieval History, 32 (2006); B. Hartland, ‘English Lordsin Late Thirteenth- and Early Fourteenth-Century Ireland: Roger Bigod and thede Clare Lords of Thomond’, EHR, 122 (2007), 318–48. For ‘captain of hisnation’, C. Maginn, ‘English Marcher Lordships in South Dublin in the LateMiddle Ages’, IHS, 34 (2004–5).


Bibliography

A. MANUSCRIPT SOURCES

Berkeley Castle, GloucestershireBerkeley Muniments (account of Receiver General 1414–15).

British Library

Additional Charters and Rolls16556 (account of receiver of Earl Marshal 1402–3)17208 (account of receiver of Margaret of Norfolk, 1387–8)17209 (accounts of bailiffs of Earl Marshal, 1422–3)40859A (account of duke of Gloucester’s treasurer of war, 1392)

Additional Manuscripts6041 (List of Mortimer muniments)

Egerton Charters and Rolls2209 (account of treasurer of great household of duke of Buckingham 1454–5)8347 (account of clerk of works at Rochford, 1430–2)8715 (Honour and Castle of Denbigh, 1331, 1354 [copy temp. Ric. II])8718 (council of the earl of March, 1395–7)8723; 8724 (Badlesmere archive relating to Mortimer lands, early Edward III)8727; 8730; 8734; 8736; 8739; 8740–1; 8747 (account rolls of receivers of earls

of March, 1360–1423)8751 (List of creditors of earl of March, 1375)8757 (Inq. Post Mortem, Edmund Mortimer, 5th earl of March, 1425)8769; 8770; 8772; 8775 (accounts of the receiver of the earl of Warwick,

1396–1436)8779 (account of receiver of the duchess of Suffolk, 1453–4)8780; 8783 (account rolls of dukes of York, 1411–1453)

Lambeth Palace Library, London

Register of Thomas ArundelRegister of William CourtenayRegister of Simon Sudbury

Magdalen College, Oxford

GPD/26/II/36 (McFarlane papers)

The National Archives: Public Record Office, London

Duchy of LancasterDL 28 DeedsDL 29 Ministers’ Accounts

220 Bibliography

ExchequerE 28 Council and Privy Seal RecordsE 101 King’s Remembrancer, Accounts Various

Judicial RecordsJUST I Justices in Eyre of Assize, Oyer and Terminer, and of the Peace, etc:

Rolls and Files

Special CollectionsSC 2 Court RollsSC 6 Ministers’ and Receivers’ AccountsSC 11 Rentals and Surveys, Rolls

Longleat House

Marquess of Bath, MS. Misc. VIII, and Misc. IX (household book of earl of Warwick,1420–1)

National Library of Wales, Aberystwyth

Peniarth MS. 280D. (‘The Red Booke of Caures Castle’)Radnor Account Roll

Northamptonshire Record Office

Westmorland (Apethorpe) Collection.

Shropshire Record Office, Shrewsbury

552/1 Powis Collection (Accounts and court rolls of Arundel estates in the March ofWales)

Staffordshire Record Office

D 641/1/2/3/4/12/36 Lord Stafford Collection (Accounts and court rolls of theStafford estates in the March of Wales)

B. PRINTED WORKS

Adam Usk, Chronicle, 1377–1421, ed. C. Given-Wilson (Oxford, 1997).Anglo-Norman Letters and Petitions, ed. M. D. Legge (Oxford, 1941).Annales Monastici, ed. H. R. Luard, 5 vols. (London, 1864–9).Archaeologia Cambrensis: Original Documents Printed as a Supplement to the Journal. Vol 1.

(London, 1877), cxlviii–clxxv.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 Documents Relating to Ireland, ed. H. S. Sweetman, 5 vols. (London,

1875–86).Calendar of the Gormanston Register, c.1175–1397, ed. J. Mills and M. J. McEnery

(Dublin, 1916).

Bibliography 221

Calendar of Inquisitions Miscellaneous, 1219–1485, 7 vols. (London and Woodbridge,1916–2003).

Calendar of Inquisitions Post Mortem, 23 vols. (London and Woodbridge, 1904–2004).Calendar of the Justiciary Rolls . . . of Ireland, ed. J. Mills et al. 3 vols. (Dublin, 1905–56).Calendar of Ormond Deeds, 1172–1350, ed. E. Curtis, 6 vols. (Dublin, 1932–43).Calendar of Patent Rolls (London, 1891–).Chartularies of St Mary’s Abbey, Dublin, ed. J. T. Gilbert, 2 vols. (London, 1884–6).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 ofWilliam the Conqueror, to that of Henry the Seventh Exclusive: With Explanatory Notesand a Glossary, ed. J. Nichols (London, 1780).

Court Rolls of the Abbey of Ramsey and of the Honor of Clare, ed. W. O. Ault (NewHaven, 1928).

A Descriptive Catalogue of Ancient Deeds in the Public Record Office, 6 vols. (London,1890–1915).

Descriptive Catalogue of the Charters and Muniments in the Possession of the R. Hon. LordFitzHardinge at Berkeley Castle, ed. I. H. Jeayes (Bristol, 1892).

Documents on the Affairs of Ireland Before the King’s Council, ed. G. O. Sayles (Dub-lin, 1979).

Edmund Spenser, A View of the Present State of Ireland, ed. W. L. Renwick (London, 1934).Expeditions to Prussia and the Holy Land Made by Henry Earl of Derby, ed. L. Toulmin

Smith (Camden Series, London, 1894).Glanvill, Tractatus de Legibus et Consuetudinibus Regni Anglie, ed. G. D. G. Hall

(London, 1993).Henry of Huntingdon, Historia Anglorum, ed. and trans. D. Greenway (Oxford, 1996).Household Accounts from Medieval England, ed. C. M. Woolgar, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1993).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).Jordan Fantosme, Chronicle, ed. R. C. Johnston (Oxford, 1981).Kingsford’s Stonor Letters and Papers 1290–1483, ed. C. Carpenter (Cambridge, 1996).Knighton’s Chronicle, 1337–1396, ed. G. H. Martin (Oxford, 1995).The Letters of Edward Prince of Wales, 1304–5, ed. H. Johnstone (Roxburghe Club, Lon-

don,1931).Le Livre de Seyntz Medicines: The Unpublished Devotional Treatise of Henry of Lancaster,

ed. E. J. Arnould (Oxford, 1940).Longer Scottish Poems: 1. 1365–1650, ed. P. Bawcutt and F. Riddy (Edinburgh, 1987).Manners and Household Expenses of England in the Thirteenth and Fifteenth Centuries, ed.

H. Turner (London, 1841).The Marcher Lordships of South Wales, 1415–1536: Select Documents, ed. T. B. Pugh

(Cardiff, 1963).The Master of Game: The Oldest English Book on Hunting, ed. W. A. and F. Baillie-Grohman

(London, 1909).Matthew Paris, Chronica Majora, ed. H. R. Luard, 7 vols. (London, 1872–83).

222 Bibliography

Medieval Framlingham: Selected Documents, 1270–1524, ed. J. Ridgard (Suffolk RecordSociety, Woodbridge, 1985).

Ministers’ Accounts of the Earldom of Cornwall, 1296–7, ed. L. M. Midgley (CamdenSoc., London, 1942–5).

Monasticon Anglicanum: A History of the Abbies and other Monasteries, Hospitals, Friaries,and Cathedral and Collegiate Churches, with their Dependencies, in England and Wales,by W. Dugdale, ed. J. Cayley, H. Ellis, and B. Bandinel, 6 vols. in 8 (2nd edn.,London, 1817–30).

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).

The Paston Letters, 1422–1509, ed. J. Gairdner, 3 vols. (London, 1910).The Peasants’ Revolt of 1381, ed. B. Dobson, 2nd edn. (London, 1983).‘Private Indentures for Life Service in Peace and War 1278–1476’, ed. M. Jones and

S. Walker, Camden Miscellany, 32 (1994), 1–191.Regestra Regum Scottorum V: The Acts of Robert I, King of Scots, 1306–1329 ed. A. A.

M. Duncan (Edinburgh, 1988).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.

(Canterbury and York Society, Oxford, 1938–47).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).Registrum Simonis de Langham Cantuariensis Archiepiscopi, ed. A. C. Wood (Canterbury

and York Society, Oxford, 1956).Registrum Simonis de Sudbiria Diocesis Londoniensis, 1362–75, ed. R. C. Fowler, C. Jen-

kins, and S. Radcliff, 2 vols. (Canterbury and York Society, Oxford, 1927–38).Rotuli Parliamentorum, ed. J. Strachey et al. 7 vols. (London, [1783], 1832).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).The Scrope and Grosvenor Controversy, 1385–90, ed. N. H. Nicolas, 2 vols. (Lon-

don, 1832).Select Pleas of the Forest, 1209–1334, ed. G. J. Turner (Selden Society, 1901).Select Pleas in Manorial and Other Seigniorial Courts, I: Reigns of Henry III and Edward I,

ed. F. W. Maitland (Selden Society, London, 1889).Sir Christopher Hatton’s Book of Seals, ed. L. C. Lloyd and D. M. Stenton (Oxford, 1950).Sir John Fortescue, The Governance of England: Otherwise Called the Difference between

an Absolute and a Limited Monarchy, ed. C. Plummer (Oxford, 1885).The Stonor Letters and Papers, 1290–1483, ed. C. L. Kingsford, 2 vols. (London, 1919).Survey of the Honour of Denbigh, ed. P. Vinogradoff and F. Morgan (London, 1914).Testamenta Eboracensia. Part I (Surtees Society, London, 1836).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 theSecond to the Accession of Queen Elizabeth, ed. N. H. Nicolas, 2 vols. (London, 1826).

Thomas Walsingham, Chronicon Angliae, 1322–1388, ed. E. M. Thompson (Lon-don, 1874).

Bibliography 223

Thomas Walsingham, Historia Anglicana, ed. H. T. Riley, 2 vols. (London, 1863–4).Vita Edwardi Secundi: The Life of Edward II by the so-called Monk of Malmesbury, ed.

N. Denholm-Young (London, 1957).Walter Bower, Scotichronicon, ed. D. E. R. Watt, et al. 9 vols. (Aberdeen, 1987–97).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).

Walter of Henley and other Treatises on Estate Management and Accounting, ed. D. M.Oschinsky (Oxford, 1971).

The Westminster Chronicle, 1381–1394, ed. L. C. Hector and B. F. Harvey (Oxford,1982).

William Worcester, The Boke of Noblesse, ed. J. Gough Nichols (Roxburgh Club,London, 1860).

Secondary Works

Alexander, J. and Binski, P. (eds.), Age of Chivalry: Art in Plantagenet England, 1200–1400(London, 1987).

Archer, R. E., ‘Rich Old Ladies: The Problem of Later Medieval Dowagers’, in Propertyand Politics: Essays in Later Medieval English History, ed. A. Pollard (Stroud, 1984),15–35.

‘The Estates and Finances of Margaret of Brotherton, c.1320–1399’, BIHR, 60(1987), 264–80.

Armitage-Smith, S., John of Gaunt, King of Castile and Leon, Duke of Aquitaine andLancaster, Earl of Derby, Lincoln and Leicester, Seneschal of England (London, 1904).

Baildon, W. P., ‘A Wardrobe Account of 16–17 Richard II, 1393–4’, Archaeologia, 62(1911), 497–514.

Baldwin, J. F., The King’s Council in England during the Middle Ages (Oxford, 1913).Barker, J., The Tournament in England 1100–1400 (Woodbridge, 1986).Barron, C., ‘Centres of Conspicuous Consumption: The Aristocratic Town House in

London, 1200–1500’, London Journal, 20/1 (1995), 1–17.Barrow, G. W. S., ‘Northern English Society in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries’,

Northern History, 4 (1969), 1–28.The Anglo-Norman Era in Scottish History (Oxford, 1980).Robert Bruce and the Community of the Realm of Scotland, 3rd edn. (Edin-

burgh, 1988).Bartlett, R., The Making of Europe: Conquest, Colonization and Cultural Change,

950–1350 (London, 1994).Bean, J. M. W., The Estates of the Percy Family 1416–1537 (Oxford, 1958).

‘Henry IV and the Percies’, History, 44 (1959), 212–27.The Decline of English Feudalism, 1215–1540 (Manchester, 1968).From Lord to Patron: Lordship in Late Medieval England (Manchester, 1989).‘Landlords’, in The Agrarian History of England and Wales, III, 1348–1500, ed.

E. Miller (Cambridge, 1991), 526–86.Bisson, T. M., ‘Medieval Lordship’, Speculum, 70 (1995), 743–59.Bloch, M., Feudal Society (London, 1961).

224 Bibliography

Bloch, M., ‘The Rise of Dependent Cultivation and Seigniorial Institutions’, in TheCambridge Economic History of Europe, vol. I, ed. M. M. Postan, 2nd edn. (Cambridge,1966), 235–90.

French Rural History: An Essay on its Basic Characteristics (English Translation,London, 1966).

Boardman, S., ‘Lordship in the North-East: The Badenoch Stewarts I, Alexander Earl ofBuchan’, Northern Scotland, 16 (1996), 1–30.

Booth, P. H. W., The Financial Administration of the Lordship and County of Chester,1272–1377 (Chetham Society, Manchester, 1981).

Bossy, J. (ed.), Disputes and Settlements: Law and Human Relations in the West (Cam-bridge, 1983).

and Jupp, P. (eds.), Essays Presented to Michael Roberts (Belfast, 1976).Boutruche, R., Seigneurie et Feodalite 2 vols. (Paris, 1959–1970).Bradney, J. A., A History of Monmouthshire from the Coming of the Normans into Wales

Down to the Present Time 12 vols. (London, 1904–33).Britnell, R. H., The Commercialisation of English Society, 1000–1500 (Cambridge, 1993).

Britain and Ireland, 1050–1530: Economy and Society (Oxford, 2004).and Pollard, A. J. (eds.), The McFarlane Legacy: Studies in Late Medieval Politics and

Society (Stroud, 1995).Brotherstone, T. and Ditchburn, D. (eds.), Freedom and Authority: Historical and

Historiographical Essays Presented to Grant G. Simpson (East Linton, 2000).Brown, M. H., ‘Regional Lordship in North-East Scotland: The Badenoch Stewarts II.

Alexander Stewart Earl of Mar’, Northern Scotland, 16 (1996), 31–54.‘ ‘‘Rejoice to Hear of Douglas’’: The House of Douglas and the Presentation of

Magnate Power in Late Medieval Scotland’, SHR, 76 (1997), 161–84.The Black Douglases: War and Lordship in Late Medieval Scotland, 1300–1455 (East

Linton, 1998).The Wars of Scotland, 1214–1371 (Edinburgh, 2004).

Brunner, O., Land and Lordship: Structures of Governance in Medieval Austria (Phil-adelphia, 1984) in English translation with introduction by Howard Kaminsky andJames Van Horn Melton.

Bullock-Davies, C., Menestrellorum Multitudo: Minstrels at a Royal Feast (Cardiff, 1978).Campbell, B. M. S., English Seignorial Agriculture, 1250–1450 (Cambridge, 2000).Carpenter, C., ‘The Beauchamp Affinity: A Study of Bastard Feudalism at Work’, EHR,

95 (1980), 514–32.Locality and Polity: A Study of Warwickshire Landed Society c.1401–1499 (Cam-

bridge, 1992).‘England: The Nobility and the Gentry’, in A Companion to Britain in the Later

Middle Ages, ed. S. H. Rigby (Oxford, 2003), 261–92.Catto, J., ‘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.

Charles-Edwards, T. M., Early Irish and Welsh Kinship (Oxford, 1993).Cherry, M., ‘The Courtney Earls of Devon: The Formation and Disintegration of a Late

Medieval Aristocratic Affinity’, Southern History, 1 (1979), 71–97.

Bibliography 225

Cheyette, F. L. (ed.), Lordship and Community in Medieval Europe: Selected Readings(Huntingdon, New York, 1968).

Chrimes, S. B., English Constitutional Ideas in the Fifteenth Century (Cambridge, 1936).Ross, C. D. and Griffiths, R. A. (eds.), Fifteenth-Century England, 1399–1509

(Manchester, 1972).Clanchy, M. T., ‘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.Cockayne, G. E., The Complete Peerage of England, Scotland, Ireland, Great Britain and

the United Kingdom, ed. V. Gibbs et al., 12 vols. in 13 (London, 1910–59).Contamine, P., ‘La seigneurie en France a la fin du Moyen Age: quelques problemes

generaux’, in Seigneurs et Seigneuries au Moyen Age (Actes de 117e congres des societessavant) (Paris, 1995), 25–46.

Coss, P., and Keen, M. (eds.), Heraldry, Pageantry and Social Display in Medieval England,(Woodbridge, 2003).

Crouch, D., The Image of Aristocracy in Britain, 1000–1300 (London, 1992).Curtis, E., Richard II in Ireland, 1394–5 (Oxford, 1927).Davenport, F. G., The Economic Development of a Norfolk Manor, 1086–1565 (Cam-

bridge, 1906).Davies, R. R., ‘Baronial Accounts, Incomes and Arrears in the Later Middle Ages’, Econ.

HR, 2nd ser., 21 (1968), 211–29.Lordship and Society in the March of Wales, 1282–1400 (Oxford, 1978).‘Brecon’ in Boroughs of Medieval Wales ed. R. A. Griffiths (Cardiff, 1978), 46–70.‘Lordship or Colony?’, in The English in Medieval Ireland, ed. J. F. Lydon (Dublin,

1984), 142–60.The Age of Conquest: Wales 1063–1415 (Oxford, 1987, 2000).The Revolt of Owain Glyn Dwr (Oxford, 1995).The First English Empire: Power and Identities in the British Isles, 1093–1343

(Oxford, 2000).Denholm-Young, N., Seigniorial Administration in England (Oxford, 1937).Dickinson, J. and Ricketts, P. T., ‘The Anglo-Norman Chronicle of Wigmore Abbey’,

Transactions of the Woolhope Field Club, 39 (1969), 413–46.Dillon (Viscount) and St. John Hope, W. J., ‘Inventory of the Goods . . . of Thomas,

Duke of Gloucester’, Archaeological Journal, 54 (1897), 275–311.Doubleday, H. A., Page, W., Salzmann, L. F. and Pugh, R. B. (eds.), Victoria History of

the Counties of England (1900– ).Du Boulay, F. R. H., ‘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 Boulayand C. M. Barron (London, 1971), 153–73.

and Barron, C. M. (eds.), The Reign of Richard II: Essays in Honour of May McKisack(London, 1971).

Duby, G., La Societe aux xie et xiie siecles dans la Region Maconnaise (Paris, 1953).Dugdale, W., The Baronage of England, 2 vols. (London, 1675–6).Duncan, A. A. M., Scotland: The Making of the Kingdom (Edinburgh, 1975).Dyer, C., Standards of Living in the Later Middle Ages: Social Change in England,

c.1200–1520 (Cambridge, 1989).

226 Bibliography

Empey, A., ‘The Norman Period, 1185–1500’, in Tipperary: History and Society, ed.W. Nolan (Dublin, 1985).

‘Conquest and Settlement: Patterns of Anglo-Norman Settlement in North Munsterand South Leinster’, Irish Economic and Social History, 13 (1986), 5–31.

Evans, B. P., ‘The Family of Mortimer’ (University of Wales Ph.D. thesis, 1934).Eyton, R. W., The Antiquities of Shropshire, 12 vols. in 6 (London, 1854–60).Fairbank, E. R., ‘The last Earl of Warenne and Surrey’, Yorkshire Archaeological Journal,

19 (1907), 193–266.Faith, R., The English Peasantry and the Growth of Lordship (Leicester, 1997).Flanagan, M. T., Irish Society, Anglo-Norman Settlers, Angevin Kingship (Oxford, 1989).Fossier, R., ‘Seigneurs et Seigneuries au Moyen Age’, in Seigneurs et Seigneuries au Moyen

Age (Actes de 117e congres des societes savant) (Paris, 1995), 9–20.Fowler, K. A., The King’s Lieutenant: Henry of Grosmont, First Duke of Lancaster

1310–1361 (London, 1969).Fox, L. and Russell, P., Leicester Forest (Leicester, 1948).Frame, R., Colonial Ireland, 1169–1369 (Dublin, 1981).

English Lordship in Ireland, 1318–1361 (Oxford, 1981).Ireland and Britain 1170–1450 (London, 1998).

Gittos, B. and M., ‘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.

Given-Wilson, C., The Royal Household and the King’s Affinity: Service, Politics and Financein England, 1360–1413 (New Haven, 1986).

The English Nobility in the Late Middle Ages: The Fourteenth-Century PoliticalCommunity (London, 1987).

‘Wealth and Credit, Public and Private: The Earls of Arundel, 1303–1397’, EHR,106 (1991), 1–26.

Goodman, A., The Loyal Conspiracy: The Lords Appellant under Richard II (London, 1971).‘The Military Sub-Contracts of Sir Hugh Hastings, 1380’, EHR, 95 (1980),

114–20.John of Gaunt: The Exercise of Princely Power in Fourteenth-Century Europe (Har-

low, 1992).Grant, A., ‘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.Independence and Nationhood: Scotland 1306–1469 (Edinburgh, 1984).‘The Wolf of Badenoch’, in Moray: Province and People, ed. W. D. H. Sellar

(Edinburgh, 1993), 143–62.‘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.

Gray, H. L., ‘Incomes from Land in England in 1436’, EHR, 49 (1934), 607–39.Griffin, M. E., ‘A Wigmore Manuscript at the University of Chicago’, National Library

of Wales Journal, 7 (1951–2), 316–25.Harriss, G. L., ‘The King and his Magnates’, in Henry V: The Practice of Kingship, ed.

G. L. Harriss (Oxford, 1984), 31–52.

Bibliography 227

Shaping the Nation: England 1360–1461 (Oxford, 2005).Harvey, B., ‘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.

Harvey, P. D. A., Manorial Records, Revised edn. (London, 1999).Hicks, M., Bastard Feudalism (London, 1995).Hilton, R. H., A Medieval Society: The West Midlands at the end of the Thirteenth Century

(London, 1967).The Decline of Serfdom in Medieval England (London, 1969).

Holmes, G., The Estates of the Higher Nobility in Fourteenth-Century England (Cam-bridge, 1957).

The Good Parliament (Oxford, 1975).Horrox, R., Richard III: A Study in Service (Cambridge, 1989).Jack, R. I., ‘Entail and Descent: The Hastings Inheritance’, BIHR, 38 (1965), 1–19.

‘Welsh and English in the Medieval Lordship of Ruthin’, Transactions of theDenbighshire Historical Society, 18 (1969), 23–49.

Jenkinson, H., ‘Mary de Sancto Paulo, Foundress of Pembroke College, Cambridge’,Archaeologia, 66 (1914), 401–46.

Joliffe, J. E. A., ‘Northumbrian Institutions’, EHR, 41 (1926), 1–43.Keen, M., ‘Chaucer’s Knight: The English Aristocracy and the Crusade’, in English Court

Culture in the Later Middle Ages, ed. V. J. Scattergood and J. W. Sherborne (London,1982), 45–61.

Origins of the English Gentleman: Heraldry, Chivalry and Gentility in MedievalEngland, c.1300–c.1500 (Stroud, 2002).

Kirby, J. L., ‘An Account of Robert Southwell, Receiver-General of John Mowbrary, EarlMarshal, 1422–3’, BIHR, 27 (1954), 192–8.

Lachaud, F., ‘Dress and Social Status in England before the Sumptuary Laws’, inHeraldry, Pageantry and Social Display in Medieval England, ed. P. Coss and M. Keen(Woodbridge, 2003), 105–23.

Lehmann, H. and Van Horn Melton, J. (eds.), Paths of Continuity: Central EuropeanHistoriography from the 1930s to the 1950s (Cambridge, 1994).

Leyser, K., ‘Frederick Barbarossa and the Hohenstaufen Polity’, Viator, 19 (1988),153–76.

Lloyd-Jones, H., Pearl, V. and Worden, B. (eds.), History and Imagination: Essays inHonour of H. R. Trevor-Roper (London, 1981).

Lydon, J. F. (ed.), The English in Medieval Ireland (Dublin, 1984).McFarlane, K. B., ‘Bastard Feudalism’, BIHR, 20 (1945), 161–80.

Lancastrian Kings and Lollard Knights (Oxford, 1972).The Nobility of Later Medieval England: The Ford Lectures for 1953 and Related

Studies (Oxford, 1973).England in the Fifteenth Century: Collected Essays. With an Introduction by G. L.

Harriss (London, 1981).McNeill, P. G. B. and MacQueen, H. L. (eds.), Atlas of Scottish History to 1707

(Edinburgh, 1996).MacQueen, H. L., Common Law and Feudal Society in Medieval Scotland (Edin-

burgh, 1993).

228 Bibliography

Maddicott, J. R., Thomas of Lancaster, 1307–1322: A Study in the Reign of Edward II(Oxford, 1970).

Law and Lordship: Royal Justices as Retainers in Thirteenth- and Fourteenth-CenturyEngland (Past and Present Supplement no. 4, 1978).

Maitland, F. W., Domesday Book and Beyond: Three Essays in the Early History of England,foreword by J. C. Holt (Cambridge, 1987).

Marks, R. and Williamson, P. (eds.), Gothic: Art for England, 1400–1547 (Lon-don, 2003).

Mason, E., ‘Legends of the Beauchamps’ Ancestors: The Use of Baronial Propaganda inMedieval England’, Journal of Medieval History, 10 (1984), 25–40.

Matthew, H. C. G. and Harrison, B. (eds.), Oxford Dictionary of National Biography:From the Earliest Times to the Year 2000, 60 vols. (Oxford, 2004).

Mertes, K., The English Noble Household, 1250–1600: Good Governance and Politic Rule(Oxford, 1988).

Miller, E. (ed.), The Agrarian History of England and Wales, III, 1348–1500 (Cam-bridge, 1991).

Milsom, S. F. C., The Legal Framework of English Feudalism (Cambridge, 1976).Morgan, D. A. L., ‘The King’s Affinity in the Polity of Yorkist England’, TRHS, 5th ser.,

vol. 23 (1973), 1–25.Morgan, P., War and Society in Late Medieval Cheshire, 1277–1403 (Manchester, 1989).Morris, R. K., ‘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.Neville, C., ‘A Celtic Enclave in Norman Scotland: Earl Gilbert of Strathearn,

1171–1223’, in Freedom and Authority: Historical and Historiographical Essays Presentedto Grant G. Simpson, ed. T. Brotherstone and D. Ditchburn (East Linton, 2000),75–92.

Nicholson, R., Scotland: The Later Middle Ages (Edinburgh, 1974).Nolan, W. M. (ed.), Tipperary: History and Society (Dublin, 1985).Orme, N., From Childhood to Chivalry: The Education of English Kings and Aristocracy,

1066–1530 (London, 1984).Orpen, G. H., Ireland under the Normans, 1169–1333, 4 vols. (Oxford, 1911–20).

‘The Earldom of Ulster’, Journal of the Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland, 43–51(1913–21).

Otway-Ruthven, A. J., A History of Medieval Ireland (London, 1968).Palmer, J. J. N., ‘Froissart et le herant Chandos’, Le Moyen Age, 88 (1982), 271–92.Payling, S. J., Political Society in Lancastrian England: The Greater Gentry of Nottingham-

shire (Oxford, 1991).‘Social Mobility, Demographic Change, and Landed Society in Late Medieval

England’, Econ. HR, 45 (1992), 51–73.‘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.

‘The Economics of Marriage in Late Medieval England. The Marriage of Heiresses’,Econ. HR, 54 (2001), 413–29.

Phillips, J. R. S., Aymer de Valence, Earl of Pembroke, 1307–1324: Baronial Politics in theReign of Edward II (Oxford, 1972).

Bibliography 229

Pollard, A. J. (ed.), Property and Politics: Essays in Later Medieval English History(Stroud, 1984).

Pollock, F. and Maitland, F. W., The History of English Law before the Time of Edward I,2 vols., reissued with an introduction by S. F. C. Milsom (Cambridge, 1968).

Post, J. B., ‘The Obsequies of John of Gaunt’, Guildhall Studies in London History, 5(1981), 1–12.

Postan, M. M. (ed.), The Cambridge Economic History of Europe, vol. I. 2nd edn.(Cambridge, 1966).

Powell, E., ‘Arbitration and the Law in England in the Later Middle Ages’, TRHS5th ser. 33 (1983), 49–67.

Prestwich, M., Edward I (London, 1988).Britnell, R. and Frame, R. (eds.), Thirteenth Century England VI (Wood-

bridge, 1997).Pugh, T. B. (ed.), Glamorgan County History, III: The Middle Ages (Cardiff, 1971).

‘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.

and Ross, C. D., ‘The English Baronage and the Income Tax of 1436’, BIHR, 26(1953), 1–28.

Ramsay, N., ‘Retained Legal Counsel, c.1275–c.1475’, TRHS, 5th ser., 35 (1985),95–113.

Rawcliffe, C., The Staffords: Earls of Stafford and Dukes of Buckingham, 1394–1521(Cambridge, 1978).

‘Baronial Councils in the Later Middle Ages’, in Patronage, Pedigree and Power inLater Medieval England, ed. C. D. Ross (Gloucester, 1979), 87–108.

Rhodes, W. E., ‘Edmund, Earl of Lancaster’, EHR, 10 (1895), 19–40, 209–37.Richardson, H. G., and Sayles, G. O., The Irish Parliament in the Middle Ages (Phil-

adelphia, 1952).Rigby, S. H. (ed.), A Companion to Britain in the Later Middle Ages (Oxford, 2003).Rosenthal, J., The Purchase of Paradise: Gift Giving and the Aristocracy, 1307–1485

(London, 1972).Roskell, J. S., Clark, L. and Rawcliffe, C. (eds.), The House of Commons, 1386–1421

4 vols. (Stroud, 1992).Ross, C. D., ‘The Household Accounts of Elizabeth Berkeley, Countess of Warwick,

1420–1’, Transactions of the Bristol and Gloucestershire Archaeological Society, 70 (1951),81–105.

(ed.), Patronage, Pedigree and Power in Later Medieval England (Gloucester, 1979).Saul, N., Knights and Esquires: The Gloucestershire Gentry in the Fourteenth Century

(Oxford, 1981).Scenes from Provincial Life: Knightly Families in Sussex, 1280–1400 (Oxford, 1986).Death, Art, and Memory in Medieval England: The Cobham Family and their

Monuments, 1300–1500 (Oxford, 1990).‘The Commons and the Abolition of Badges’, Parliamentary History, 9 (1990),

302–15.Richard II (New Haven, 1997).

230 Bibliography

Scattergood, V. J., ‘Literary Court Culture at the Court of Richard II’, in English CourtCulture in the Later Middle Ages, ed. V. J. Scattergood and J. W. Sherborne (London,1982), 29–44.

Sellar, W. D. H. (ed.), Moray: Province and People (Edinburgh, 1993).Sharp, M., ‘The Household of the Black Prince’, in T. F. Tout, Chapters in Medieval

Administrative History, 6 vols. (Manchester, 1920–33), V, 289–400.Simms, K., From Kings to Warlords: The Changing Structure of Gaelic Ireland in the Later

Middle Ages (Woodbridge, 1987).Smith, J. B., ‘The Lordship of Glamorgan’, Morgannwg, 9 (1965), 9–38.Smith, L. B., ‘Proofs of Age in Medieval Wales’, Bulletin of the Board of Celtic Studies, 38

(1991), 134–44.‘Disputes and Settlements in Medieval Wales; The Role of Arbitration’, EHR, 106

(1991), 835–60.Smyth, J., 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).Somerville, R., History of the Duchy of Lancaster. Vol 1: 1265–1603 (London, 1953).Stenton, F. M., The First Century of English Feudalism, 2nd edn. (Oxford, 1961).Stephens, L., and Lee, S. (eds.), Dictionary of National Biography 66 vols. (London,

1885–1901; reprinted with corrections, 22 vols., London, 1908–9).Stephens, W. B. (ed.), A History of the County of Warwick. Volume VIII: The City of

Coventry and Borough of Warwick (VCH, London, 1969).Stone, E., ‘Profit-and-Loss Accountancy at Norwich Cathedral Priory’, TRHS, 5th ser.,

12 (1962), 25–48.Storey, R. L., ‘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.Stringer, K. J., Earl David of Huntingdon, 1152–1219: A Study in Anglo-Scottish History

(Edinburgh, 1985).(ed.), Essays on the Nobility of Medieval Scotland (Edinburgh, 1985).

Tomkinson, A., ‘Retinues at the Tournament of Dunstable’, EHR, 74 (1959), 70–89.Tuck, A. and Goodman, A. (eds.), War and Border Societies in the Middle Ages (Lon-

don, 1992).Turner, H. T., ‘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.

Turner, R., Chepstow Castle (Cardiff, 2002).Underhill, F. A., For Her Good Estate: The Life of Elizabeth de Burgh (New York, 1999).Vale, J., Edward III and Chivalry: Chivalric Society and its Context, 1270–1350 (Wood-

bridge, 1982).Van Horn Melton, J., ‘From Folk History to Structural History: Otto Brunner

(1898–1982) and the Radical Conservative Roots of German Social History’, inPaths of Continuity: Central European Historiography from the 1930s to the 1950s, ed.H. Lehmann and J. Van Horn Melton (Cambridge, 1994), 263–97.

Verdier, P., ‘La Construction d’une Seigneurie dans la Champagne du XIIIe siecle: RenierAcorre, seigneur de Gouaix (1257–1289)’, in Seigneurs et Seigneuries au Moyen Age(Paris, 1995), 99–110.

Bibliography 231

Walker, S., ‘Profit and Loss in the Hundred Years War: The Subcontracts of Sir JohnStrother, 1374’, BIHR, 58 (1985), 100–6.

‘Lordship and Lawlessness in the Palatinate of Chester, 1370–1400’, Journal ofBritish Studies, 28 (1989), 325–48.

The Lancastrian Affinity, 1361–1399 (Oxford, 1990).Ward, J., English Noblewomen in the Later Middle Ages (Harlow, 1992).Watts, J. L., Henry VI and the Politics of Kingship (Cambridge, 1996).Waugh, S. L., ‘Tenure to Contract: Lordship and Clientage in Thirteenth-Century

England’, EHR, 101 (1986), 811–39.Woolgar, C. M., The Great Household in Late Medieval England (New Haven, 1999).Wormald, J., Lords and Men in Scotland: Bonds of Manrent, 1442–1603 (Edin-

burgh, 1985).


Additional Bibliography

PRINTED WORKS

‘Calendar of Documents Relating to Medieval Ireland in the Series of Ancient Deedsin 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 andGloucestershire Archaeological Society, vols. 17 and 18 (Bristol, 2004).

The Court Rolls of Elmley Castle, Worcestershire, 1347–1564, ed. R. K. Field. Worcester-shire 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 ofthe 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. Kow-alski. 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 [GeneralEditor] 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 Crecy, 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 (Cam-bridge, 2007).

Biancalana, J., The Fee Tail and the Common Recovery in Medieval England (Cam-bridge, 2001).

Biggs, C., ‘Seigniorial Control of Villagers’ Litigation Beyond the Manor in LaterMedieval 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 Transformationsin Late Medieval England (Leiden, 2002).

Blakely, R. M., The Brus Family in England and Scotland, 1100–1295 (Wood-bridge, 2005).

234 Additional Bibliography

Boardman, S., ‘The Campbells and Charter Lordship in Medieval Argyll’, in The Exerciseof Power in Medieval Scotland, c.1200–1500, ed. S. Boardman and A. Ross (Dublin,2003), 93–117.

The Campbells, 1250–1513 (Edinburgh, 2006).and Ross, A. (eds.), The Exercise of Power in Medieval Scotland, c.1200–1500

(Dublin, 2003).Bothwell, J. S., Edward III and the English Peerage: Royal Patronage, Social Mobility and

Political Control in Fourteenth-Century England (Woodbridge, 2004).Falling from Grace: Reversal of Fortune and the English Nobility, 1075–1455

(Manchester, 2008).(ed.), The Age of Edward III, (Woodbridge, 2001).

Brand, P., ‘Stewards, Bailiffs and the Emerging Legal Profession in Later Thirteenth-Century England’, in Lordship and Learning: Studies in Memory of Trevor Aston, ed.R. Evans (Woodbridge, 2004), 139–53.

‘A Versatile Legal Administrator and More: The Career of John of Fressingfield inEngland, Ireland and Beyond’, in Ireland and the English World in the Late MiddleAges: Essays in Honour of Robin Frame, ed. B. Smith (Basingstoke, 2009).

Britnell, R. (ed.), The Winchester Pipe Rolls and Medieval English Society (Wood-bridge, 2003).

Burtscher, M., The Fitzalans: Earls of Arundel and Surrey, Lords of the Welsh Marches(1267–1415) (Logaston, 2008).

Campbell, B. M. S., ‘The Agrarian Problem in the Early Fourteenth Century’, Past andPresent, 188 (2005), 3–70.

‘The Land’, in A Social History of England, 1200–1500, ed. R. Horrox and W. M.Ormrod (Cambridge, 2006), 179–237.

and Bartley, K., England on the Eve of the Black Death: An Atlas of Lay Lordship,Land and Wealth, 1300–49 (Manchester, 2006).

Castor, H., The King, the Crown and the Duchy of Lancaster: Public Authority and PrivatePower, 1399–1461 (Oxford, 2000).

Cavell, E., ‘Aristocratic Widows and the Medieval Welsh Frontier: The ShropshireEvidence’, TRHS 6th ser., 17 (2007), 57–82.

Childs, W., ‘Cloth of Gold and Gold Thread: Luxury Imports to England in the Four-teenth Century’, 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), 267–85.

‘Moving Around’, in A Social History of England, 1200–1500, ed. R. Horrox andW. M. Ormrod (Cambridge, 2006), 260–75.

Clark, L. (ed.), The Fifteenth Century VI: Identity and Insurgency in the Late Middle Ages(Woodbridge, 2006).

Clarke, H. B., Prunty, J. and Hennessy, M. (eds.), Surveying Ireland’s Past: Multidiscip-linary Essays in Honour of Anngret Simms (Dublin 2004).

Collins, H., The Order of the Garter, 1348–1461: Chivalry and Politics in Late MedievalEngland (Oxford, 2000).

Contamine, P., La Noblesse au Royaume de France de Philippe le Bel a Louis XII: Essai deSynthese (Paris, 1997).

Coss, P., The Lady in Medieval England, 1000–1500 (Stroud, 1998).

Additional Bibliography 235

The Origins of the English Gentry (Cambridge, 2003).‘An Age of Deference’, in A Social History of England, 1200–1500, ed. R. Horrox

and W. M. Ormrod (Cambridge, 2006), 31–73.Coulson, C., Castles in Medieval Society: Fortresses in England, France, and Ireland in the

Central Middle Ages (Oxford, 2003).Creighton, O. H., Castles and Landscapes (London, 2002).Crook, D., ‘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), 125–39.

Crooks, P., ‘Factions, Feuds and Noble Power in the Lordship of Ireland c.1356–1494’,IHS, 35 (2006–7), 425–54.

Crouch, D., The Birth of Nobility: Constructing Aristocracy in England and France,900–1300 (Harlow, 2005).

Tournament (London, 2005).Curry, A., Agincourt: A New History (Stroud, 2005).

and Matthew, E. (eds.), The Fifteenth Century I: Concepts and Patterns of Service inthe Later Middle Ages (Woodbridge, 2000).

Daly, K., ‘ ‘‘Centre’’, ‘‘Power’’ and ‘‘Periphery’’ in Late Medieval France’, in War,Government and Power in Late Medieval France, ed. C. Allmand (Liverpool, 2000),124–44.

Dodd, G. (ed.), The Reign of Richard II, (Stroud, 2000).and Musson, A. (eds), The Reign of Edward II: New Perspectives. (Woodbridge, 2006).

Doran, L. and Lyttleton, J. (eds.), Lordship in Medieval Ireland: Image and Reality(Dublin, 2008).

Dryburgh, P., ‘Roger Mortimer and the Governance of Ireland, 1317–20’, in Irelandand the English World in the Late Middle Ages: Essays in Honour of Robin Frame, ed.B. Smith (Basingstoke, 2009).

Duffy, S. (ed.), The World of the Galloglass: Kings, Warlords and Warriors in Ireland andScotland, 1200–1600 (Dublin, 2007).

Dunn, A., ‘Richard II and the Mortimer Inheritance’, in Fourteenth Century England II,ed. C. Given-Wilson (Woodbridge, 2002), 159–70.

The Politics of Magnate Power in England and Wales 1389–1413 (Oxford, 2003).Dyer, C., An Age of Transition? Economy and Society in England in the Later Middle Ages

(Oxford, 2005).‘Seigniorial Profits on the Land Market in Late Medieval England’, in Le Marche de

la Terre au Moyen Age, ed. L. Feller and C. Wickham (Rome, 2005), 219–36.‘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, Pastand Present Supplement 2 (Oxford, 2007), 69–86.

Coss, P. and Wickham, C. (eds.), Rodney Hilton’s Middle Ages: An Exploration ofHistorical Themes, Past and Present Supplement 2 (Oxford, 2007).

Eales, R. and Tyas, S. (eds.), Family and Dynasty in Late Medieval England (Doning-ton, 2003).

Evans, R. (ed.), Lordship and Learning: Studies in Memory of Trevor Aston (Wood-bridge, 2004).


Evans, R. (ed.), ‘Whose was the Manorial Court?’ in Lordship and Learning: Studies inMemory of Trevor Aston, ed. R. Evans (Woodbridge, 2004), 155–68.

Fawcett, R., Scottish Medieval Churches: Architecture and Furnishings (Stroud, 2002).Foard, G., ‘Medieval Woodland, Agriculture and Industry in Rockingham Forest,

Northamptonshire’, Medieval Archaeology, 45 (2001), 41–96.Feller, L. and Wickham, C. (eds.), Le Marche de la Terre au Moyen Age (Rome, 2005).Fleming, P., Family and Household in Medieval England (Basingstoke, 2001).Frame, R., ‘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), 125–38.

‘Historians, Aristocrats and Plantagenet Ireland, 1200–1360’, in War, Governmentand 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), 131–47.

Fry, S., Burial in Medieval Ireland, 900–1500 (Dublin, 1999).Gee, L. L., Women, Art and Patronage from Henry III to Edward III, 1216–1377

(Woodbridge, 2002).Given-Wilson, C., ‘Chronicles of the Mortimer Family, c.1250–1450’, in Family and

Dynasty in Late Medieval England, ed. R. Eales and S. Tyas (Donington, 2003),81–101.

Chronicles: The Writing of History in Medieval England (London, 2004).(ed.), Fourteenth Century England II (Woodbridge, 2002).Kettle, A. and Scales, L. (eds.), War, Government and Aristocracy in the British Isles

c.1150–1500: Essays in Honour of Michael Prestwich (Woodbridge, 2008).Grant, A., ‘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 andE. Matthew (Woodbridge, 2000), 145–79.

Green, D., ‘Political Service with Edward the Black Prince’ in The Age of Edward III, ed.J. S. Bothwell (Woodbridge, 2001), 53–68.

The Battle of Poitiers, 1356 (Stroud, 2002).‘Edward the Black Prince and East Anglia: An Unlikely Association’ in Fourteenth

Century England III, ed. W. M. Ormrod (Woodbridge, 2004), 83–98.Edward the Black Prince: Power in Medieval Europe (Harlow, 2007).

Griffiths, R. (ed.), The Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries (Oxford, 2003).Hopkins, T. and Howell, R. (eds.), The Gwent County History. Volume 2. The Age

of the Marcher Lords, c.1070–1536 (Cardiff, 2008).Grundy, A., ‘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 inLate Medieval England, ed. M. Hicks (Woodbridge, 2001), 57–70.

Hadley, D. M., Death in Medieval England: An Archaeology (Stroud, 2001).Harris, B. J., English Aristocratic Women, 1450–1550: Marriage, Family, Property, and

Careers (Oxford, 2002).Hartland, B., ‘Vancouleurs, Ludlow and Trim: The Role of Ireland in the Career of

Geoffrey de Geneville (c.1226–1314)’, IHS, 32 (2001), 457–77.‘Reasons for Leaving: The Effects of Conflict on English Landholding in Late

Thirteenth-Century Leinster’, Journal of Medieval History, 32 (2006), 18–26.‘English Lords in Late Thirteenth- and Early Fourteenth-Century Ireland: Roger

Bigod and the de Clare Lords of Thomond’, EHR, 122 (2007), 318–48.


Hennessy, M., ‘Manorial Agriculture and Settlement in Early Fourteenth-CenturyCounty Tipperary’, in Surveying Ireland’s Past: Multidisciplinary Essays in Honourof Anngret Simms, ed. H. B. Clarke, J. Prunty and M. Hennessy (Dublin, 2004),99–118.

Hicks, M. (ed.), The Fifteenth Century II: Revolution and Consumption in Late MedievalEngland (Woodbridge, 2001).

Horrox, R., and Ormrod, W. M. (eds.), A Social History of England, 1200–1500(Cambridge, 2006).

Jobson, A. (ed.), English Government in the Thirteenth Century (Woodbridge, 2004).Johnson, M., Behind the Castle Gates: From Medieval to Renaissance (London, 2002).Jones, M, ‘Memory, Invention and the Breton State: The First Inventory of the Ducal

Archives (1395) and the Beginnings of Montfort Historiography’, Journal of MedievalHistory, 33 (2007), 275–96.

Kenny, G., Anglo-Irish and Gaelic Women in Ireland c.1170–1540 (Dublin, 2007).Kenyon, J. R., ‘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. Hopkinsand R. Howell (Cardiff, 2008), 89–114.

and O’Conor, K. (eds.), The Medieval Castle in Ireland and Wales (Dublin, 2003).King, A., ‘Fortresses and Fashion Statements: Gentry Castles in Fourteenth-Century

Northumberland’, Journal of Medieval History, 33 (2007), 372–97.‘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), 148–62.

Kingston, S., Ulster and the Isles in the Fifteenth Century: The Lordship of the ClannDomhnaill of Antrim (Dublin, 2004).

Langdon, J., Mills in the Medieval Economy: England 1300–1540 (Oxford, 2004).Lawrence, M., ‘Secular Patronage and Religious Devotion: The Despensers and St Mary’s

Abbey, Tewksbury’, in Fourteenth Century England V, ed. N. Saul (Woodbridge,2008), 78–93.

Liddiard, R., Castles in Context: Power, Symbolism and Landscape, 1066 to 1500 (Maccle-sfield, 2005).

(ed.), The Medieval Park: New Perspectives (Manchester, 2007).Liddy, C., War, Politics and Finance in Late Medieval English Towns: Bristol, York and the

Crown, 1350–1400 (Woodbridge, 2005).Lord, P., The Visual Culture of Wales: Medieval Vision (Cardiff, 2003).McAndrew, B., Scotland’s Historic Heraldry (Woodbridge, 2006).McCormack, A., The Earldom of Desmond, 1463–1583: The Decline and Crisis of a

Feudal Lordship (Dublin, 2005).MacDonald, A. J., Border Bloodshed: Scotland and England at War, 1369–1403 (Edin-

burgh, 2000).‘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), 139–58.

MacQueen, H. L., ‘Survival and Success: The Kennedys of Dunure’, in The Exercise ofPower in Medieval Scotland, c.1200–1500, ed. S. Boardman and A. Ross (Dublin,2003), 67–94.


Maginn, C., ‘English Marcher Lordships in South Dublin in the Late Middle Ages’, IHS,34 (2004–5), 113–36.

Malcolm, J., ‘Castles and Landscape in Uí Fhiachrach Muaidhe, c.1235–c.1400’, inLordship in Medieval Ireland: Image and Reality, ed. L. Doran and J. Lyttleton (Dublin,2008), 193–216.

Marks, R., Image and Devotion in Late Medieval England (Stroud, 2004).Marshall, A., ‘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), 190–204.

‘An Early Fourteenth Century Affinity: The Earl of Norfolk and his Followers’, inFourteenth Century England V, ed. N. Saul (Woodbridge, 2008), 1–12.

Matthew, E., ‘Henry V and the Proposal for an Irish Crusade’, in Ireland and theEnglish World in the Late Middle Ages: Essays in Honour of Robin Frame, ed. B. Smith(Basingstoke, 2009).

Mileson, S. A., Parks in Medieval England (Oxford, 2009).Morgan, P., ‘Ranks of Society’, in The Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries, ed. R. Griffiths

(Oxford, 2003), 59–85.Morgan, N and Thomson, R. (eds.), The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain.

Volume II, 1100–1400 (Cambridge, 2008).Morris, M., The Bigod Earls of Norfolk in the Thirteenth Century (Woodbridge, 2005).

Castle: A History of Buildings (Oxford, 2003).Mortimer, I., The Greatest Traitor: The Life of Sir Roger Mortimer, Ist Earl of March, Ruler

of England, 1327–30 (London, 2003).Moss, R, ‘Permanent Expressions of Piety: The Secular and the Sacred in Later Medieval

Stone Sculpture’, in Art and Devotion in Late Medieval Ireland, ed. R. Moss, C. OClabaigh and S. Ryan (Dublin, 2006), 72–97.

O Clabaigh, C. and Ryan, S. (eds.), Art and Devotion in Late Medieval Ireland(Dublin, 2006).

Muller, M., ‘Seigniorial Control and the Peasant Land Market in the Fourteenth Century:A Comparative Approach’, in Le Marche de la Terre au Moyen Age, ed. L. Feller andC. Wickham (Rome, 2005), 297–313.

Murphy, M., ‘The Profits of Lordship: Roger Bigod, Earl of Norfolk and the Lordship ofCarlow, 1270–1306’, in Lordship in Medieval Ireland: Image and Reality, ed. L. Doranand J. Lyttleton (Dublin, 2008), 75–98.

Neville, C., Native Lordship in Medieval Scotland: The Earldoms of Strathearn and Lennox,c.1140–1365 (Dublin, 2005).

Nicholls, K., ‘Scottish Mercenary Kindreds in Ireland, 1250–1600’, in The World ofthe Galloglass: Kings, Warlords and Warriors in Ireland and Scotland, 1200–1600, ed.S. Duffy (Dublin, 2007), 86–105.

Ormrod, W. M. (ed.), Fourteenth Century England III, ed. W. M. Ormrod (Wood-bridge, 2004).

Penman, M., David II, 1329–71 (East Linton, 2004).Pettifer, A., Welsh Castles: A Guide by Counties (Woodbridge, 2000).Platt, C., ‘Revisionism in Castle Studies: A Caution’, Medieval Archaeology, 51 (2007),

83–102.Potter, D. (ed.), France in the Later Middle Ages (Oxford, 2002).


Potterton, M., Medieval Trim: History and Archaeology (Dublin, 2005).Prestwich, M., Plantagenet England, 1225–1360 (Oxford, 2005).

‘The Enterprise of War’, in A Social History of England, 1200–1500, ed. R. Horroxand W. M. Ormrod (Cambridge, 2006), 74–90.

(ed.), Liberties and Identities in Later Medieval Britain (Woodbridge, 2008).Prosser, G., ‘ ‘‘Decayed Feudalism’’ and ‘‘Royal Clienteles’’: Royal Office and Magnate

Service in the Fifteenth Century’, in War, Government and Power in Late MedievalFrance, ed. C. Allmand (Liverpool, 2000), 175–89.

‘The Later Medieval French Noblesse’, in France in the Later Middle Ages, ed.D. Potter (Oxford, 2002), 182–209.

Pryce, H. and Watts, J. (eds.), Power and Authority in the Middle Ages: Essays in Memoryof Rees Davies (Oxford, 2007).

Radulescu, R. and Truelove, A. (eds.), Gentry Culture in Late Medieval England(Manchester, 2005).

Ramsay, N., ‘Archive Books’, in The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain. Volume II,1100–1400, ed. N. Morgan and R. Thomson (Cambridge, 2008), 416–45.

Razi, Z. and Smith, R. (eds.), Medieval Society and the Manor Court (Oxford, 1996).Reynolds, S., ‘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.

Rogers, C. J., War Cruel and Sharp: English Strategy under Edward III, 1327–60(Woodbridge, 2000).

Royan, N., ‘ ‘‘Mark your Meroure be Me’’: Richard Holland’s Buke of the Howlat’, inA Companion to Medieval Scottish Poetry, ed. P. Bawcutt and J. Hadley Williams(Woodbridge, 2006), 49–62.

Saul, N. (ed.), Fourteenth Century England V (Woodbridge, 2008).Schofield, P., ‘Manorial Court Rolls and the Peasant Land Market in Eastern England,

c.1250–c.1350’, in Le Marche de la Terre au Moyen Age, ed. L. Feller and C. Wickham(Rome, 2005), 237–71.

Simms, K., ‘The Archbishops of Armagh and the O’Neills, 1347–1471’, IHS, 19 (1974),38–55.

‘Guesting and Feasting in Gaelic Ireland’, Journal of the Royal Society of Antiquariesof Ireland, 100 (1978–9), 67–100.

‘Images of Warfare in Bardic Poetry’, Celtica, 21 (1990), 608–19.Simpkin, D., The English Aristocracy at War: From the Welsh Wars of Edward I to the

Battle of Bannockburn (Woodbridge, 2008).Small, G., ‘Centre and Periphery in Late Medieval France: Tournai, 1384–1477’, in

War, Government and Power in Late Medieval France, ed. C. Allmand (Liverpool,2000), 145–74.

‘The Crown and the Provinces in the Fifteenth Century’, in France in the LaterMiddle Ages, ed. D. Potter (Oxford, 2002), 130–54.

Smith, B., Colonisation and Conquest in Medieval Ireland: The English in Louth,1170–1330 (Cambridge, 1999).

‘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. Pryceand J. Watts (Oxford, 2007), 153–63.


Smith, B., (ed.), Ireland and the English World in the Late Middle Ages: Essays in Honourof Robin Frame (Basingstoke, 2009).

Spufford, P., Power and Profit: The Merchant in Medieval Europe (London, 2002).Stevenson, K., Chivalry and Knighthood in Scotland, 1424–1513 (Woodbridge, 2006).

‘ ‘‘Thai War Callit Knychtis and Bere the Name and the Honour of that HyeOrdre’’: Scottish Knighthood in the Fifteenth Century’, in The Fifteenth Century VI:Identity and Insurgency in the Late Middle Ages, ed. L. Clark (Woodbridge, 2006),33–52.

Stober, K., Late Medieval Monasteries and their Patrons: England and Wales, c.1300–1540(Woodbridge, 2007).

Stone, D., Decision-Making in Medieval Agriculture (Oxford, 2005).Thornton, T., ‘Cheshire: The Inner Citadel of Richard II’s Kingdom?’, in The Reign of

Richard II, ed. G. Dodd (Stroud, 2000), 85–96, 144–8.Vale, M., The Princely Court: Medieval Courts and Culture in North-West Europe,

1270–1380 (Oxford, 2001).Verstraten, F., ‘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),47–74.

Walker, S., ‘Order and Law’, in A Social History of England, 1200–1500, ed. R. Horroxand W. M. Ormrod (Cambridge, 2006), 91–112.

Political Culture in Later Medieval England (Manchester, 2006).Waters, K., ‘The Earls of Desmond and the Irish of South-Western Munster’, Journal of

Medieval History, 32 (2006), 54–68.Wheatley, A., The Idea of the Castle in Medieval England (York, 2004).Whittle, J., The Development of Agrarian Capitalism: Land and Labour in Norfolk,

1440–1580 (Oxford, 2000).Wilkinson, L., Women in Thirteenth-Century Lincolnshire (Woodbridge, 2007).Will, E., ‘John of Gaunt’s Household: Attendance Rolls in the Glynde Archive, MS

3469’, in Fourteenth Century England V, ed. N. Saul (Woodbridge, 2008), 13–30.Woolgar, C. M., ‘Fast and Feast: Conspicuous Consumption and the Diet of the Nobility

in the Fifteenth Century’, in The Fifteenth Century II: Revolution and Consumption inLate Medieval England, ed. M. Hicks (Woodbridge, 2001), 7–25.

The Senses in Late Medieval England (New Haven, 2006).and Serjeantson, D. and Waldron, T. (eds.), Food in Medieval England: Diet and

Nutrition (Oxford, 2006).

Index

Abergavenny (Mon.) castle and town of 113,152, 216; lordship of 72, 76; see alsoBeauchamp

acclamation 199advowry men 198affinity 33, 191, 201; see also retinueAgincourt 116, 128Agnes Hastings 61 n. 7Albany, duke of, see StewartAldbourne (Wilts.) 107, 180Aldersgate (London) 88Aldgate (London) 88Alexandria 119Alice Chaucer, duchess of Suffolk (d. 1475) 78Alice Fitzalan, countess of Kent (d. 1415) 152,

153Alice Lacy, countess of Lancaster (d. 1348) 26Algeciras 118, 137Altofts (Yorks.) 107Anglo-Saxon Chronicle 181Angus, earldom of 23, 55, 133Anne Beauchamp, Lady Despenser 152Anne of Woodstock, countess of Stafford

(d. 1438) 41, 67, 165 n. 26annuity 68, 148; as reward for supporters

199, 201, 204–10, 214–16; role inrecruitment of armies 121, 123, 131

Aquitaine 89; prince of, see Edward the BlackPrince

Arbroath, declaration of 23Arden (Warw.) 66Argyll, 133; see also CampbellArundel (Fitzalan), Thomas, archbishop of

Canterbury (1396–7 and 1399–1414) 9Arundel (Sussex), castle and town 34 69, 76,

85, 91, 93, 111, 193; earls and earldomof 25, 85, 93, 189, 216; see also, Fitzalan

Ashperton (Heref.) 155Atherston (Warw.) 203Atholl, earldom of 23, 26, 55attorneys 88, 163, 205; see also lawyersaudit, 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 18Avallon 118

Bache, Simon 104 n. 77Badenoch (Highland) 173; lord of, see Stewart,

Alexanderbadges and collars 32–3, 65, 73, 121, 208,

212–13Badlesmere, Sir Bartholomew (d. 1322) 37,

38, 144, 154–5Bala (Gwynedd) 200Bamburgh (Northumberland) 203Bangor, bishop of 67Bann, river 35banquets, feasts 44, 66, 68, 70, 76, 93, 96, 97baptism, christening 67, 70, 90, 98Bardfield (Essex) 107, 187Barley, Sir Richard 215Barnard Castle (co. Durham) 108Basset, Ralph (d. 1390) 30‘bastard feudalism’ 5, 65, 206, 210Batter, John 175Bean, J. M. W. 10, 208Beauchamp, Joan, see Joan Fitzalan; John,

lord of Beauchamp and baron ofKidderminster (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 management70, 184, 185; as military commander118, 123, 138

Thomas (d. 1369) 31, 119, 146Thomas (d. 1401) 65, 71, 146; see also

WarwickBeauchamp, 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 ofDorset (d. 1410) 59, 162; John, duke ofSomerset (d. 1444) 128; Thomas, earl ofDorset, duke of Exeter (d. 1426) 60, 105

Beaufort, family of 52, 54, 61beds 32, 63, 89, 92Belknap, Sir Robert (d. 1401) 205bequests, see wills

242 Index

Bere, Sir John de la 130Bergerac 61, 128Berkeley (Glocs.), 37Berkeley, 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) 57Berwick-upon-Tweed 122Bigod, Roger, earl of Norfolk (d. 1306) 25,

42, 53, 83, 84, 100, 183, 194Bisham abbey (Berks.) 72, 73Bishopsgate (London) 88Bisson, Thomas 2Black Prince, see Edward, the Black PrinceBlanche, duchess of Lancaster (d. 1368) 75, 76Blickling, Roger 109Bloch, Marc 1, 2Blyth (Notts.) 135Bohun, 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 116Bolingbroke (Lincs.) 180Bolingbroke, Henry, see Henry IVbond-land, see demesneBordesley abbey (Worcs.) 98Boutruche, Robert 2, 4, 6Bower, Walter (d. 1449) 7 n. 16, 48Braose, family of 64Brecon (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, 202Brian, family of 157Bridgewater (Dorset) 180Bridgwater (Somerset) 38Bristol 90, 106, 109, 135, 152Brittany, 131; see also Breton expeditionBromfield and Yale, lordship of (Salop) 15, 79,

152, 173, 198, 200Bromwich, Sir John 130Brotherton, see Thomas of BrothertonBrown, Michael 134The Bruce 47Bruce, family of 22, 23Bruce, Edward, earl of Carrick, ‘king of

Ireland’ (d. 1318) 44; Robert, earl of

Carrick (d. 1304) 133; Robert, king ofScotland, see Robert I

Bruges 129Brugge, Walter, archdeacon of Meath, canon of

York 186, 188Brunner, Otto 17Brut chronicle and legend 34 n. 32, 35Buchan, earl of, see StewartBuckingham, duke of, see Stafford; earl of, see

Thomas of WoodstockBuke of the Howlat 35Bungay (Suffolk) 84, 108Burgh, family of 24, 151, 153, 189Burgh, earls of Ulster: Richard (d. 1326) 14,

46, 48, 49, 68, 113, 124; biography43–5; marriage strategies 70, 153;William (d. 1333), 27, 46, 66; see alsoUlster

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, 212Burtscher, Michael 31 n. 21Bury St Edmunds (Suffolk) 66, 171Butler, family of 132Butler, Edmund, earl of Carrick (d. 1321) 68Butler, James, earl of Ormond (d. 1382) 68,

214; see also Ormond

Caerleon (Mon.) 37, 180cain 160Caithness, earldom of 23Calais 135, 136Caldicot (Gwent) 85, 87Calveley, Sir John 71Campbell, family of, lords of Argyll 6, 133Cantelou, Nicholas (d. 1355) 156;

Sir William, 146Canterbury (Kent) 71, 72Canterbury, archbishops of, see Arundel,

Courtenay, Stafford‘captain of the nation’ 202Cardiff 90, 109card games 96Carlow 173Carmelites, house of, London 97Carpenter, Christine xi, xiiCarrick (Scotland), earldom of 23, 44, see also

BruceCarthusians 100Cas Troggy (Gwent) 84Castile 215castles 33, 76, 190, 203; administrative

centres 37, 189, 190; construction anddomestic arrangement of 44, 48,

Index 243

82–113, 138; focal points of lordship 78,79, 118, 125, 173, 180 venues for feasts,tournaments 65, 66, 69, 136

Castle Philippa, see Shrawardinecattle 44, 90, 108, 132, 153, 160, 161, 163,

see also commorthCaw (Salop) 193Cedewain (Powys) 130chamberlain 103, 104, 184, 187Champagne 201chancellor 66, 112, 187, 190Chandos, Sir John (d. 1370), herald of 117Charlemagne, 91Charleton, Robert 205Charlton, family of, 205Charlton, John, of Powys (d. 1360) 35, 155,charters, 16, 17, 33, 37, 122, 134, 147, 166,

203; as source for study of lordship beforec.1250 8, 9, 31, 142, 197

Chastellain, Georges 102Chedworth, Thomas 46 n. 63, 113Cheney, Roger 189Chepstow 84, 106, 107, 109; see also Strigoilchess 89, 96Chester 53, 108, 121, 171, 174; earl of, see

Edwardchevauchee 119, 123, 125,Cheyette, Frederic 2Cheyney, Sir Hugh 123Chichester (Sussex) 47Chirk, lordship of (Salop) 144, 152; see also

Mortimerchivalry 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) 29Cistercians 100, 162Clare (Suffolk) 45, 90, 165, 180 n. 5, 181Clare College Cambridge 100Clare, family of 25, 44, 143, 153, 187, 194Clare, earls of Gloucester: Gilbert (d. 1295)

27, 70; Gilbert (d. 1314) 153, 158;Richard (d. 1262) 92

Clare, Elizabeth, see Elizabeth, lady of ClareClaverdon (Warw.) 66Clee, John 88Clemsland (Cornwall) 193Clerkenwell (London) 70Clifford family 151, 203Clifford, lordship of (Wales) 107Clifton, Sir John 131Clinton, William, earl of Huntingdon

(d. 1354) 141; Sir William 29Clopton, Sir Walter (d. 1400) 131Clowne, William, abbot of Leicester

(d. 1378) 9Clun, lordship of (Salop) 79, 111, 192–3

Cobham, Reginald, Lord (d. 1361) 117Coleraine (Derry) 35Colne priory (Lancs.) 74commendation 198commorth 160‘competence’ (in land) 11, 64, 141, 162Comyn, family of 22, 23, 55Connacht 45, 181Constance of Castile, duchess of Lancaster

(d. 1394) 72‘Contrariants’ 36conveth 161Conway, Sir Henry 68cornage 160Cornwall 78, 121; archdeacon of, 200; earl,

duke of, see Edmund, Edwardcoronation 23, 30, 199Coucher Book 38council, 45, 71, 87, 94, 109, 112, 148, 152;

membership 204, 205, 208, 211, 214;military aspects; 124, 130; presence oflord at 41, 66, 184, 192–3; role of inadministering 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; manorial198; 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, 193Court of Chivalry 32Coventry (Warw.) 135Cranbourne (Dorset) 180Crawford, earldom of 26Crecy 118Crouch, David 8crown xi, 80, 104, 127, 174, 217crusade 32, 70, 97, 118–9, 137–8, 207Cyprus, 92, 137

Dacre, Ralph 151; William 151Dagworth, Sir Thomas (d. 1350) 119Dalkeith (Midlothian) 147, 173; lord of, see

DouglasDarcy, Sir John (d. 1347) 207; Philip

(d. 1333) 66; Philip, Lord Darcy(d. 1399) 131

Dauntsey, Sir Stephen 193David II, king of Scotland (1329–71) 26, 202David, earl of Huntingdon (d. 1219) 14, 173Dee, river (Scotland) 48

244 Index

demesne 12, 82, 159, 170; demesnefarming 83, 107–8, 163–5, 167, 169,187, 194

Denbigh, lordship of 160–1, 180, 191Denholm-Young, N. 4, 214Desmond, earls of, see GeraldinesDespenser, family of 25, 152; Edward, lord of

Glamorgan (d. 1375) 16; Hugh theyounger (d. 1326) 41; Sir Hugh(d. 1349) 12, 75, 128, 152, 208

Devon, 98, 125, 157, 191; earls, countessesof, 33, 60, 62, 137, 204, 209, see alsoCourtenay

dice, games of 96Dieppe 28Dinas (Dyfed) 130Diss (Norfolk) 108Domesday Book 181Dorset 30, 163, 174, 180; duke, earl of, see

BeaufortDouglas, family of 16, 26, 38, 48, 120, 128,

134, 214; cultivation of image andhistory 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 jointuresDrayton (Warw.) 30Drury, Roger 131Dublin 23, 27, 66, 68; marquis of, see VereDuby, Georges 3Dugdale, William 5Dunbar, earls, earldom of 23, 55, 56Duncan MacDuff, earl of Fife (d. 1353) 55,

165, 170Dunstable (Beds.) 135, 136Dunstanburgh (Northumberland) 87, 180Durham, bishop of 32; liberty of 172Dyffryn Clwyd, see Ruthin

Earl Marshal, see Mowbray, JohnEarnwood (Salop) 154East Anglia 43, 45, 46, 79, 143, 174, 181,

193, 209Edeligion (Mon.) 36Edmund of Almaine, earl of Cornwall

(d. 1300) 25, 60, 165, 183Edmund, earl of Lancaster (d. 1296) 135, 159Edmund of Langley, earl of Cambridge, duke

of York (d. 1402) 29, 52, 70education, educational bequests 35, 47, 94–5,

96, 100

Edward I, king of England (1272–1307) 27,28, 31, 39, 79, 113, 135, 200; promotionof relatives 60, 68, 144 ; relationship withnobles 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 ofrelatives 26, 29, 69, 151; relationshipwith nobles 12, 25–6, 28, 30, 59, 61, 94,141, 143; wars of 117–18, 119

Edward, the Black Prince, earl of Chester, dukeof Cornwall, prince of Wales, prince ofAquitaine (d. 1376) 26, 45, 59, 96, 111,199; funeral of 71–3; management ofestates 36–7, 40, 66, 167, 174, 184,186–8, 192, 198–200, 214; aswarlord 117, 118, 121, 125

Edward, duke of York (d. 1415) 90, 95, 99,108–9, 116, 128, 165

Eleanor, countess of Leicester (d. 1275) 100Eleanor Bohun, duchess of Gloucester

(d. 1400) 75, 87, 91, 92, 93, 98 101Eleanor Clare (d. 1337) 34Elgin cathedral 133Elizabeth Badlesmere, countess of

Northampton (d. 1356) 154, 155Elizabeth Berkeley, countess of Warwick

(d. 1422) 97Elizabeth Bohun, countess of Arundel

(d. 1385) 72Elizabeth Burgh, countess of Ulster (d. 1363),

wife of Lionel of Clarence 57, 69, 151Elizabeth [lady of] Clare (widow of John

Burgh) (d. 1360), 100, 149; affinityof 209, 212; domestic arrangements andestate management of 63, 88, 90, 107,108, 163–5, 167, 174, 184, 188, 194,195; funeral of 73, 75; marriages anddescendants of 83, 143, 153

Elizabeth of Lancaster (d. 1425), daughter ofJohn of Gaunt 156

Elizabeth Mohun, countess of Salisbury(d. 1415) 73

Elmham, Sir William 71Elsing (Norfolk) 12Ely (Cambs.), bishop of 89; liberty of 171enfeoffments to use 72, 140, 147–8England, English: composition and size of

nobility in 11, 22, 142–4; crown-noblerelations 59–60, 126; dispersed nature ofestates of nobility 13, 27–8, 82, 179–80;economic exploitation and value oflordship in 40, 163–72; military aspectsof lordship in 127–9; noble self-image

Index 245

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 withFrance 119–20, 131–2, 134–5

English, Barbara 8entails 47, 140, 145–8, 163entry fine, 169, 198Erpingham, Sir Thomas (d. 1428) 30esquires 39, 124, 136; as members of affinities

201, 203, 209, 212, 215; in noble counciland households 90, 105, 107, 185

Essex 108, 162, 203; earl and earldom of, 26;see also Bohun

Etchingham (Sussex) 12Etchingham, Sir William 12Ettrick Forest (Borders) 168Evesham, abbot of 67Ewyas Lacy, lordship of (Heref.) 130, 143Exeter (Devon) 78, 135; dukes, earls of, see

BeaufortEye, church of (Suffolk) 78

Faith, Rosamund 171falconry 82, 96fealty, oath of 7, 78–9, 169, 198–200Feast of the Swans, (1306) 68feasts, see banquetsFelbrigg, Sir George 63, 188, 211Ferrers, family 37; Lady Ferrers, see Margaret

PercyFife, earl, earldom of, see DuncanFish, fisheries 105–7, 109, 166, 168–70Fitzalan, family of 13, 25, 42, 79, 85, 88, 152,

165, 173, 192Fitzalan, 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; conflictwith Richard II 65, 86, 91, 96;management of estates 87, 164, 191,192–3, 205; will 72, 74, 77, 92

Thomas (d. 1415) 110, 128Fitz Pain, Robert 30, 144, 154Fitz Thomas, John, earl of Kildare, see

Geraldines of OffalyFitz Walter, Walter, (d. 1406) 124, 128Fitzwarin, Fulk (d. 1374) 25Flanders 14, 128, 216Fleet, prison (London) 76Forde, William 188forest, rights of tenants in 43, 140; seigniorial

exploitation of 82, 125, 162, 166–70,176; foresters 167, 190; see also hunting

formulary books 198, 207Forncett (Norfolk) 83–4Fortescue, Sir John (d. 1479) 127, 128Fossier, Robert 1Fotheringay (Northants.) 27Fountains (Yorks.), abbot of 109Frame, Robin 24, 44Framlingham (Suffolk) 84, 96, 106, 107, 108,

109, 110France, French, 104, 184; study of lordship

in 1, 2, 3, 201; language of lordship 94,98; negotiations with 46, 48 129; warwith 30, 41, 90, 110, 111, 117–18, 119,138, 147, 184; war profits 128 see alsoAgincourt; chevauchee; Crecy

franchises 2, 12, 36, 181Freskin the Fleming 23Froissart, Jean (d. 1404) 48, 117funerals 47, 71–4, 76, 90, 216Furness and Whalley (Lancs.), abbot of 125furnishings, furniture 32, 64, 89, 92–3; see

also beds; tapestries

Gaelic society 131–3, 161, 201galloglass 133Galloway 47, 48Gamelyn 91gardens 87Garioch (Scotland) 14, 173Gascony 14, 44, 126; see also wineGeneville (Joinville), family 83; Peter 143gentry 5, 10, 11, 78, 93, 142, 147; relations

with lords 181, 190, 201, 202, 206,213

George, St 91, 93Geraldines of Desmond 24, 27, 44, 56, 120,

128, 151; Maurice Fitz Thomas, earl ofDesmond (d. 1356) 66, 132

Geraldines of Offaly, 24, 27, 44, 56; John FitzThomas, earl of Kildare (d. 1316) 14, 44

Germany 1, 2, 3, 6, 18, 200Gilsland (Cumbria) 151Glamorgan 15, 27, 158, 173, 179; lord of, see

Clare; Despenser‘Glanvill’ 15Gloucester 24, 44, 65, 90, 106; dukes, earls of,

see Audley; Clare; Thomas of WoodstockGlyn Dwr, Owain (d. c.1416) 138Gogan, Ralph 84Good Parliament (1376) 46, 130Goodrich (Heref.) 13, 103, 106Gower 173gowns, robes 65, 73, 93, 104, 204, 212, 214;

see also, liveryGrandison, Sir Piers 155Great Revolt (1381) 36, 89, 122, 167, 176

246 Index

Green, Judith 8Greenway, Diana 8Grey, family of 41, 156, 167; Henry 156;

Sir John (d. 1323) 156; Reginald, lord ofRuthin (d. 1388) 29, 156, 174; Robertson of Richard of Codnor, 30; see alsoFitz Pain, Robert

Greyfriars, London 100Grosseteste, Robert, bishop of Lincoln

(d. 1253) 58, 211Guildford (Surrey) 135Guy, Sir Thomas 71‘Guy of Warwick’ 31, 33Gwent 15

Hakeluyt, Leonard 123Halton (Cheshire) 191Hamilton, John 30Hamstead Marshall (Berks.) 84Hanley (Worcs.) 90, 109Hanmer, Sir David, chief justice of the King’s

Bench (d. 1388) 193, 205Harvey, Barbara 11Hastings, 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, 124Haughmond abbey (Salop) 192Hay, Gilbert (d. c.1465) 170Hebrides 133Henry III, king of England (1216–72) 13Henry IV, (Henry Bolingbroke, duke of

Hereford), king of England (1399–1413);lifestyle and interests, 63, 88, 96–7, 98,109, 111; marriage 70, 101; participationin crusades and tournaments 136–7;retinue and lordship 79, 80, 89, 90, 103,104, 174 186, 202, 209, 212; asking 110, 126, 203, 216

Henry V, king of England (1413–22) 110,119, 138

Henry VI, king of England (1422–61) 138Henry, earl of Lancaster (d. 1345) 52, 66, 194Henry of Grosmont, duke of Lancaster

(d. 1361) 4, 59, 61, 209; management ofestates and retinue; 82, 89, 209 marriagealliances 70, 136; military career 118,123, 127–8 religious interests 62, 74, 77,83, 94, 95, 99 101

Henry of Huntingdon 8heralds, heraldry 31–2, 35, 36, 38, 39, 64,

117, 136Herbert, Thomas 203Hereford 70, 118, 130, 135, 142, 185; bishop

of 46; countess of, see Joan; duke, earlsof 71, 188, 199; see also Bohun; Henry IV

Heron, William, Lord Say (d. 1404) 127Herrschaft 1, 2, 3Hertford 82, 87, 89, 93, 135, 136Higham Ferrers (Northants.) 82, 107, 125Highlands, Scottish, 7, 120, 122, 133, 160Hildeburgh, Thomas 187Hilton, Rodney 11, 170Holborn (London) 89Holland, 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 ofSurrey) (d. 1400) 216

Holland, Isabel, mistress of John of Warenne,earl of Surrey (d. 1347) 28

Holme, Master William, king’s physician 204Holmes, George 166Holt (Norfolk) 111, 173Holy Land 138homage, act of 7, 15, 23, 78–9, 198–9, 201Hopedale (Flintshire) 166horngeld 160Hotspur, see PercyHouse of Commons 185household 4, 6, 12, 13, 46, 151; accounts 9,

13, 36, 63, 136, 183, 184; constitutionand support 82–113, 163–5, 185–8,208, 211; military aspect 120, 125, 126servants 65, 71, 74, 204, 212;travelling 70, 152

Howell, Oliver 68Hungerford, Sir Thomas, M.P., Speaker of the

House of Commons (d. 1397) 185hunting, chase 31, 82–4, 90, 93, 94 95–7,

99, 102, 116, 118, 166; lodge 65, 84Huntingdon, earl of, see Clinton, David,

Holland

indentures of retinue xi, 123, 129, 186,197–216; nature and use ofdocuments 9, 17 120–1; specifications ofservice 127, 130, 135, 137

investiture 60, 201Ireland, Irish xi, xii, 2, 5, 10, 60, 98, 155, 206;

aristocratic estates in 12, 13, 14, 27, 143,145, 147, 153, 179; castles and theirmodification in 82, 86; economicexploitation and value of estates in 158,174; Gaelic (‘Celtic’) society in 13, 17,161, 201; nature and reputation oflordship in 15, 24, 28, 113, 141, 160,172, 176–7, 181–2, 189, 198; size andcomposition of resident nobility; 22–4,25, 43–7; visits to and military campaignsin 65, 71, 117, 120, 122–5, 128, 131–3,135, 186, 202

Index 247

Isabel Despenser, countess of Warwick(d. 1439) 75

Isabella Fortibus, countess of Devon andcountess of Aumale (d. 1293) 41, 165

Jerusalem 91, 137jesters 91, 97Joan of Acre, countess of Gloucester

(d. 1307) 69, 70, 155Joan of Bar, countess of Surrey (d. 1361) 28,

149Joan Bohun, countess of Hereford

(d. 1419) 149Joan 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 30Joan Geneville, countess of March

(d. 1356) 143Joan de Munchensi, countess of Pembroke

(d. 1307) 69, 99, 103, 106Joce, John 130John, duke of Berry (d. 1416) 91John 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 estatesand household 36 40, 103, 104, 105,107, 109, 110, 112, 163, 164, 165, 183,187, 188, 192, 195; marriage alliancesand provision for family 67, 70, 72, 75,76, 88, 151, 156, 162, 209; as member ofroyal family 25, 29, 62; provisions ofwill 71, 74; religious concerns 99–100,101; as warlord 122, 123, 125, 126, 215

John Fitz Thomas, see Geraldines of OffalyJohn son of the duke of Brabant 69John of Salisbury 31jointures 109, 111, 140, 149, 153, 163Joinville, see Genevillejoust 32, 48, 64, 68, 70, 97, 99, 116, 118,

135–7; see also tournamentjudges 46, 204–5

Kenilworth (Warw.) 83, 85, 86, 87, 89, 93,135, 167

Kenneth Mor 7 n. 16Kennington (Surrey) 135, 136Kent, 203; earl and earldom of 152; see also

Hollandkerne, ‘caterans’ 132–3, 135Kidderminster, baron of, see BeauchampKidwelly (Dyfed) 86Kildare, earls, earldom, liberty of 24, 27, 44,

172, 173; see also Geraldines of OffalyKildrummy (Aberdeenshire) 79

Kilkenny 27, 172Kilmainham (Dublin) 66Kimbolton (Cambs.) 108kindred, lineage groups 44, 198, 202King’s Bench 193, 205King’s Lynn (Norfolk) 137, 214Kingstone (Heref.) 130Knaresborough (Yorks.) 83, 122knights, 30, 67, 83, 95, 198; ceremony of

knighting 44, 48, 68–9; position relativeto 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, 167Lacy, 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, 213Lancashire 123, 160, 180, 209, 215Lancaster 121, 171, 174, 180, 191; dukes,

earls of see Edmund; Henry; Henry ofGrosmont; John of Gaunt; Thomas

Lancelot 91‘lands of peace’ 202,‘lands of war’ 24, 48, 122, 202Lanercost priory (Cumbria), chronicle of 41

n. 52, 151 n. 27Langford, Sir Nicholas 71lawyers 2, 21, 140, 144, 163, 170, 204–5Leake, treaty of 44Ledbury (Heref.) 90, 109Leicester, 9, 70, 77, 82, 83, 94, 99, 100, 118,

136, 180, 181, 185; earldom of 201; seealso Montfort

Leland, John (d. 1552) 86Lennox, earldom of 23, 55Lestrange, family, of Knockin 205Leventhorp, John 186Lewyn, John 87Leyser, Karl 6Liber Niger de Wigmore 38liberties, 2, 24, 101, 134, 166, 171–7, 179,

189, 203; see also franchisesLincoln, earl of, see LacyLincolnshire 125, 193lineage 31, 142; lineage groups, see kindredLingen, Sir Ralph 130Lingfield (Surrey) 117Lionel of Antwerp, earl of Ulster and duke of

Clarence (d. 1368) 45, 57, 69, 143, 151,187, 189

Lithuania 131livery 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; liveryrolls, 204, 212

Livre de Seyntz Medecines 62, 74, 94, 101Lochmaben (Dumfries and Galloway) 117London 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 161Louth, earl of, see BerminghamLucy, Sir William 113Ludgate, prison (London) 76Ludlow (Salop) 36, 67, 83, 130, 143, 180Lusignan, Pierre, king of Cyprus and Jerusalem

(1358–69) 137Luttrell, Sir Geoffrey (d. 1345) 70Luttrell Psalter 90

McFarlane, K. B. xi, xii, 4, 7, 11, 21,25, 42, 58, 127, 144, 152, 183n. 8, 206

Maconnais, 3‘Macthomas’s rout’ 132Madeley (Glocs.) 85Malise, earl of Strathearn (d. 1317) 56, 173Magna Carta 11, 21maintenance xi, 15, 199–215Maitland, F. W. 17Makeley, Robert 88manrent, bond of 7, 199Manton, William 188Mar, earl and earldom of 23, 168; see also

StewartMarch, earls and earldom of 24, 41, 62, 64,

69, 90, 117, 152, 182, 205, 211; see alsoMortimer

March, law of 176March 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 andresources 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 ofSt Albans (d. 1396) 9

Margaret, daughter of King Edward I, wife ofJohn 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) 70market 12, 89, 105, 106, 108–9, 164–5, 167,

182marriage 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 (HenryIV) 70, 96, 101

Mary of St Pol, countess of Pembroke(d. 1377) 32, 100, 149

Mascy, Sir John 131Mason, William 110The Master of Game 95Maud Badlesmere, wife of Robert Fitz

Pain 154Maud Burgh, countess of Gloucester

(d. 1320) 153Maud, Lady Stafford, duchess of Bavaria

(d. 1362) 136Mauny, Sir Walter (d. 1372) 75, 119Maxtock (Warw.) 108Maxtoke (Warw.) 203Maxwell, Herbert (d. 1453) 214Meath 15, 45, 143, 173, 181; archdeacon of,

see BruggeMediterranean 119Melreth, Philip 187Menteith, earldom of 23, 26Michelwood (Glocs.) 95Middle East 137Milan, duke of 96mills 165, 168, 170, 176, 187Milsom, S. F. C. 8Milverton (Somerset) 38ministerium 77ministers’ accounts 182, 192Minoresses 88minstrels, see music, musiciansMold, lordship of (Clwyd) 78Monk of Westminster 47, 69Monmouth 90, 190Montagu, earls of Salisbury: John (d. 1400)

99, 162; William (d. 1344) 72, 153;William (d. 1397) 41, 78

Montagu, Sir John 75Montfort, Simon, earl of Leicester

(d. 1265) 95Monthermer, Ralph (d. 1325) 155, 156

Index 249

Moray 120, 122, 169, 170Moreton Valence (Glocs.) 69Mortimer, 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, 149Roger (d. 1398) 43, 71, 93, 100, 150, 180,

180, 188; visits to his estates 79, 90Morton, earl of 173Mowbray, family of 31, 32, 64, 88, 151, 169

n. 41, 188, 190; John, Lord Mowbray(d. 1361) 153

Mowbray, earls of Nottingham, earls and dukesof 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 ofNorfolk (d. 1399) 69, 71; see also Norfolk

Multon, Thomas (d. 1313) 144 n. 8, 151music, musicians, minstrels 33, 66, 70, 87, 91,

96–7, 117, 136, 211

Narberth, lordship of (Dyfed) 150Navarre 135Needwood (Staffs.) 107Nevill, Richard, of London, money-lender 109Neville, family of 85, 86, 87, 162; John, lord

of Raby (d. 1388) 86; Ralph earl ofWestmorland (d. 1425) 86, 146

New Forest (Hants.) 152Newgate, prison (London) 76Newport (Gwent) 90, 152, 193Neyte, La, manor of Westminster abbey 89nontgeld 160Norfolk 12, 30, 109, 180; countess of, see

Margaret; dukes, earls of 16, 17, 24, 32,

203, 211; see also Bigod; Thomas ofBrotherton; Mowbray

Norman Conquest 31, 34, 58, 83, 84Normandy 99Northampton, countess of, see Elizabeth

Badlesmere; earls of 117, 153; see alsoBohun

Northamptonshire 193Northumberland 130, 180, 209; earls of 46,

151, 212; see also PercyNorwich (Norfolk) 30, 109, 214Nottingham 152, 185; earl of, see Mowbray

Oaksey (Wilts.) 108Odcombe (Somerset) 38, 169Order of the Garter 136Ormond, earls and earldom of 24, 27, 69,

151, 153; see also ButlerOrpen, [Henry] Goddard 27Oswestry, lordship of (Salop) 152Otterburn (Northumberland), battle of

(1388) 117, 128Oxford 72, 100; earl of 16, 106 n. 84, 117; see

also VereOvedale, Sir Peter 152, 208

The Pageants of Richard Beauchamp 33Painter, Sydney 8palatinates 2, 121, 171, 174, 176, 180, 189pannage 166parliament 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 123Peak (Derbs.) 164Peasants’ Revolt, see Great RevoltPeche, John 111Peckforton Park (Cheshire) 167Peebles (Borders) 117, 134Pembridge (Heref.) 130Pembroke 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 100pension 199, 209; see also annuityPercy, family of 4, 38, 87, 88, 126, 162, 203,

209; castle building by 85–6; Henry, earlof Northumberland (d. 1408) 62, 85;Henry ‘Hotspur’ (d. 1403), 128; see alsoNorthumberland

petitions, petitioners 16, 41, 175, 184, 185,188, 191, 192, 193, 207–8

Pevensey (Sussex) 180

250 Index

Phebus, Gaston count of Bearn (d. 1391) 95Philipot, John 111Philippa Montagu, countess of March

(d. 1382), wife of Earl Roger Mortimer(d. 1360) 72

Philippa Mortimer, countess of Pembroke andArundel (d. 1400) 87, 152

Philippa Plantagenet, countess of March(d. 1378), wife of Earl Edmund Mortimer(d. 1381) 45, 143, 149, 151

Pickering (Yorks.) 83pigs 105, 166; see also pannagePleshey (Essex) 85, 91–3, 99Plessington, Sir Robert (d. 1393) 205Plymouth (Devon) 129, 130Poer, family 10Poitiers 48Poland 138Pole, de la, family 128, 131; Michael, earl of

Suffolk (d. 1388) 60; William, duke ofSuffolk (d. 1450) 78

Pontefract (Yorks.) 37, 83, 95, 102, 125, 180,181, 185, 191, 212

Porchalion, Thomas 75Powell, Edward xiPoynings, Lord 31Prague 137Principality of Wales 132protection 15, 16, 48, 159–61, 175,

198–200, 209, 212provincial lordships (Scotland) 23Prussia 97, 118, 119, 131, 137Pryce, Huw xiiPuddington (Cheshire) 131

Quo warranto 2

Raby (co. Durham) 86Radnor, lordship of (Powys) 36Ragman Roll 79, 200Ramsey, abbot of 78Randolph, Thomas, earl of Moray

(d. 1332) 122ransom 111, 116, 123, 127–8, 129, 207Ravensthorpe (Yorks.) 156receiver-general 186–8, 193, 212‘regalities’ (Scotland) 48, 172registers 9, 16, 36, 38, 66, 111, 190, 192;

Register of Edward the Black Prince 184;Registrum Honoris de Morton 38

Reigate (Surrey) 86, 92religious sentiment 47, 73, 75–7, 92, 94–5,

99–102; see also crusaderenders, see tributes and rendersRestormel (Cornwall) 78

retainers, retaining 46, 58, 65, 85, 102, 104,130–2, 151, 175, 188, 190, 191; duties66, 68, 120–1, 152, 193, 207, 208;expectations and rewards 123, 185, 201,204; general discussion 197–215

Rhodes 137, 148Richard 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 withnobles 25, 43, 65, 71, 86, 109, 203

Richard Wych, St 47Richard’s Castle (Heref.) 67Roath (Cardiff) 158Robert I, king of Scotland (1306–29) 23, 32

44, 47, 122Robert II, king of Scotland (1371–90) 23Robert III, king of Scotland (1390–1406) 61Robert Fitzhamon (d. 1107) 34robes, see gownsRoche, family 10Rochford (Essex) 87‘Rochfordeyn’, family 147Rodley (Glocs.) 107Rolls of Arms 11, 31Rome 138Ross (Scotland) 23, 61Ross-on-Wye (Heref.) 90Rothesay, duke of, see StewartRous, John 34Roxburgh (Borders) 134Russel, Sir John (d. 1405) 207Russell, John, bishop of Lincoln (d. 1494) 203Russia 138Ruthin (Dyffryn Clwyd), lordship of 41, 156,

167, 171, 174; see also Grey

Sackville, Sir Andrew 211St Agnes, London 88St Albans, abbey and abbot of (Herts.) 9, 100Sainte ChapelleSt Denys, Paris 48St Emilion, see wineSt Inglevert 136, 137St John, Sir Edward 216St Mary Newarke, Leicester 77St Mary’s, Leicester 9, 100St Mary’s, Warwick 75St Pancras, Lewes 71St Paul’s, London 75, 76, 111, 136, 216Salisbury, cathedral of 72, 146; countess of, see

Elizabeth; earl and earldom of 26, 62, 75,78, 153, 165, 167; see also Montagu

Saul, Nigel 10Savoy palace (London) 36, 66, 82, 87, 89

Index 251

Saxtead (Suffolk) 96Say, Lord, see HeronScone (Perthshire) 61Scotland, 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 oflordship in 38, 160–1, 165–6, 173, 174;military aspects of lordship in 82, 85, 86,119–20, 122, 128, 133–5; nature andreputation of lordship in 7, 15, 16, 47–8,113, 141, 145, 158, 179, 182, 189, 199,204, 213–4; noble self-image and tastesin 32, 35, 61, 98 9, 198; study of lordshipin 5, 8, 10, 172, 181; warfare withEngland and in France 44, 46, 68, 79,90, 103, 116–7, 118, 124, 131, 132, 216

Scrope, family 87, 162Scrope-Grosvenor dispute (1386) 32, 117Seals, signets 32, 39, 40, 62, 95, 112, 116,

187, 190, 193Seigneurie 1, 2, 3, 17, 41, 167, 168, 201, 209Segrave, family arms of 64; John, Lord Segrave

(d. 1353) 149Selkirk (Borders) 134serf, serfdom 6, 161 169, 197, 200serjeants-at-law 163, 204; see also lawyersSevern, estuary, river 85, 87, 90, 107Sheriff Hutton (Yorks.) 86Shrawardine (Salop) 85, 87, 91–3, 193Shrewsbury (Salop) 35, 43, 193, 216Simpson, Grant 8Skeathy (Kildare) 147Slimbridge (Glocs.) 97Smithfield (London) 136Smyth, John 164Somerset 30, 38; duke, earl of, see BeaufortSouthampton (Hants.) 106Spain 32, 117, 190Spalding (Lincs.) 191Spenser, Edmund 161Stafford 85, 193Stafford, family of 4, 12, 33, 59, 88, 108, 185,

216; documents relating to lordshipof 13, 38, 163, 192, 193, 194; Anne,countess of, see Anne; Edward, duke ofBuckingham (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

steward 45, 46, 86, 104, 113, 130, 163, 173,175, 181–6, 189–93, 198, 211

Stewart, family of 23, 61; Alexander, earl ofBuchan (‘the Wolf of Badenoch’),(d. 1405) 61, 133, 173; Alexander, earl ofMar (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, 208Strange, Lord 208Strathearn, earl, earldom of 23, 168, 173; see

also MaliseStrigoil/Chepstow, lordship of 84, see also

ChepstowStringer, Keith 8, 14Strother, Sir John (d. 1494) 124, 130Sudbury (Suffolk) 187Suffolk 30, 71, 84, 109, 125, 180; Alice,

duchess of, see Alice; earls and earldom of,see Pole; Ufford

Sully (Glamorgan) 158Surrey 29, 203; earls of, see Warenne; duke of,

see HollandSussex 29, 85, 162, 164, 180Sutherland, earldom of 23Sutton Coldfield (Warw.) 65Swillington, Sir Adam 65, 66; Robert 215Swinfield, Richard, bishop of Hereford

(1283–1317) 89

tail male 30, 140, 151tailzie 145Talbot, John, 67tallage 168Tamworth (Staffs.) 66Tantallon (East Lothian) 85Tany, Sir John 69tapestries 32, 33, 63, 89, 91–2Taunton (Somerset) 6Tenby (Dyfed) 29tenure, tenurial obligations 17, 78, 148, 171,

197, 199, 202, 207Teutonic Order 96Tewkesbury (Glocs.) 34, 75, 109Thelwall, Thomas, chancellor of the duchy and

county of Lancaster 66Thetford, prior of 110Thomas of Brotherton, earl of Norfolk

(d. 1338) 155Thomas Cantilupe, St 47Thomas, duke of Clarence (d. 1421) 72Thomas, earl of Lancaster (d. 1322) 4, 15, 44,

209; acquisition and management ofestates 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 alliancesand family 67, 87, 101; militarycareer 124, 125, 126, 130

Thomond 172Thoresby (Notts.) 191Thornbury (Glocs.) 37, 193Threave (Galloway) 48, 85, 134Throckmorton, John (d. 1445) 185Tickhill (Yorks.) 83Tintern abbey (Mons.) 36, 84, 100Tipperary 172, 173, 174titles 16, 21 25, 58–61, 141, 162; hierarchy

of 11, 22, 23, 24, 26, 58–60; pridein 28, 29, 61

Tor Brian (Devon) 157Touraine, duke of, see DouglasTourn 171, 193tournaments 66, 69–70, 93, 155, 207, 208,

216; as regular feature of aristocraticlife 31, 64, 82, 90, 98, 103; as substitutefor war 116, 118, 127, 135–8

Tower of London 36, 69, 151Tower-house, 85, 132Trent, river 185Tres Riches Heures 91Tresgoz, Sir Robert 130tributes and renders 44, 47, 48, 82, 108

159–61, 176, 198, 202Trim (Meath) 45, 68, 143, 172, 173, 181Trokesford, Lady Isabel 66Turk, Robert 131Turks 137Tutbury (Staffs.) 83, 97, 112, 125, 180

uchelwyr 10Ufford, family of, earls of Suffolk 25Ulster 14, 24, 44, 172; earls, earldom of 32,

35, 43, 45, 120, 151, 169, 181; see alsoBurgh; Lionel; Mortimer

Umfraville, family of 23unfree tenants, see serf, serfdomUsk/Caerleon, lordship of (Mon.) 35, 37, 83,

90, 100, 107, 130, 167, 181Usk, Adam (d. 1430) 35, 42, 47, 100

Valence, family of 88; Aymer, earl ofPembroke (d. 1324) 4, 25, 32, 207; Joan,countess of Pembroke, see Joan deMunchensi; Sir William (d. 1296) 13

valor 9, 36, 41, 165, 194–5Varenne 28vassal, vassalage 59, 173, 197, 198, 213Venice 137

Venour, William 111Vere family, earls of Oxford 25, 38, 74;

Robert, earl of Oxford, marquis ofDublin, duke of Ireland (d. 1392) 59,131

Verona 138Vienna 137

Wales, Welsh 2, 12, 37, 82, 86, 121;aristocratic estates in 27, 29, 143, 153,162, 180, 182; economic exploitation andvalue of lordship in 107–8, 164, 166,168; native (‘Celtic’) society in 10, 13,35, 84, 123, 147, 160; nature andreputation 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 andmilitary campaigns in 14, 79, 90, 138,152, 174, 184, 186, 193, 199–200; seealso March; Principality; uchelwyr

Waltham (Essex) 136; abbey 70, 153Walton (Suffolk) 84Ward, Jennifer 107wardrobe, 63, 88, 89, 95, 98, 104, 106, 125,

187, 189; wardrober, 104, 184, 188Warenne, John de, earl of Surrey (d. 1347) 15,

25, 28–9, 30, 71, 73, 146, 173Warkworth (Northumberland) 85Wars of Independence 14, 27Warwick 33, 37, 85, 87, 108, 123; countess

of, see Elizabeth; earls and earldom of 12,37, 42, 65, 85, 123, 155, 207; see alsoBeauchamp; ‘Guy of Warwick’

Waterton, Hugh 103wayting 161Wells, Lord 71Wenlok, Walter, abbot of Westminster

(1283–1307) 89Wentwood Forest (Mons.) 84Westminster 24, 68, 88, 97; abbey 75, 89; see

also Monk of WestminsterWestmorland, earl of, see NevilleWexford (Ireland), lordship of 14, 172Wigmore (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 ofcharity 62, 73, 76–8, 105, 204; detailingfuneral rites 47, 71–4, 76; listing prizedpossessions, 92, 93, 98, 116

Wiltshire 61, 180Winchester, bishop of 6, see Wykeham

Index 253

Windsor (Berks.) 86wine, 66, 94, 105–6, 109, 214;

St Emilion 106Wintringham, William 87Wodecock, John 88Wooton (Oxon.) 97Worcester 37, 42, 109, 185; earl of, see

BeauchampWrexham (Denbyshire) 199Writtle (Essex) 108

Wycliff, John (d. 1384) 16, 101Wye, river 84Wykeham, William, bishop of Winchester

(1367–1404) 148

Yevele, Henry 75, 87York, 88, 103, 186; archbishop of, 96; dukes

of, see Edmund of Langley; EdwardYorkshire 180, 181, 209Ystlwyf (Carmarthenshire) 29