The history of the greater and lesser lay landowners of England in this period, the aristocracy to use an anachronistic but convenient term, is a huge subject, one that has its own substantial historiography concerning their development, identity and interests but which also touches almost every aspect of English history. For these landowners were in large part the political, governmental and, as producers and consumers, economic motors of England at this time.
It is with Anglo-Norman landowners that the modern historiography of this group begins: with Round’s family history studies of the late nineteenth century, which helped inspire Stenton’s work of 1932, itself the inspiration for further distinguished work up to the present day. By contrast, the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries were abandoned to historians who concentrated on institutions, notably parliament and central government, until, in the post-war era, K. B. McFarlane inspired a whole school of historians to study first the nobility and then the gentry of the late medieval period. Although it is only recently that Holt’s and Painter’s pioneering work on the thirteenth century has been taken up, and there are still large gaps in our knowledge for Henry II’s reign and for much of the fourteenth century, we now know an extraordinary amount about the aristocracy of 1100-1500, even if historians are not always agreed about what they know or what it means.
If land was the basis of wealth in medieval England, it was also the basis of power. As long as the king had no standing army of his own, it was the peasant tenants of the landowners who provided the local military manpower that stood implicitly, and sometimes explicitly, behind royal commands and made possible their enforcement in the localities. Mostly, this power was freely placed at the king’s disposal, for the excellent reason that it was ultimately the king who guaranteed the security of the landed property, first of the nobles, and eventually, through the king’s law, of all landowners. It would indeed be a mistake to assume that there was ever intrinsic antagonism between royal and aristocratic power. There might be hostility to the king’s demands, first on the nobles’ money and then, from the thirteenth century, on the gentry’s; at times there was animosity to royal intervention in the shires. But landowners and crown essentially stood together to preserve their privileged position at home and to defend their country against enemies abroad. The counsel of lay and ecclesiastical magnates was crucial in helping kings to restrain themselves from the excesses to which their enormous power might tempt them, but everyone agreed that, in theory at least, the king was above restraint, as he had to be if his authority was to be used impartially. As the king’s government grew in scope and in depth, so the relationship with the aristocracy became ever more symbiotic. There was however a changing power balance between king and aristocracy, and therefore between king and localities, of which the chronology and implications are complex and much debated. Broadly and crudely we can say that there was an even distribution of power between centre and localities in the Anglo-Norman period but that this tipped firmly to the centre in the later twelfth century, once the king’s law made his power indispensable to all landowners. It began to flow back the other way in the thirteenth, when lesser landowners demanded control of the growing amount of governance that they were experiencing and the sheer expansion of royal power required more delegation to the shires. Towards the end of the fifteenth century, royal government began to tighten its hold over the shires again.
World History
